Painting # 88, something a bit different

Well, here I go, disrupting my plan, today's painting is much larger than the 6" or 7" that I've been doing, my friend and neighbor wanted me to paint a portrait of her cat, so, I decided to oblige her, she loves her cat, she gave me this huge album of her cat and, I think she was leaning toward the one where the cat was in the coal bucket that she keeps by the fireplace, well, my brain said that was too cute, so I picked this one, I liked the angular position of the cat and the full face of him, so this is the one I liked, and I believe she will love it, of course I may have to do an extra blog painting so I end up with 365 at the end (if that ever gets here, the end that is), I don't know, maybe, maybe not, we'll see. I just know that I couldn't put this composition on the 6" format that I've been doing, besides, it would make the cat much smaller and I wasn't sure I could pull that off. Anyway, here is the painting, I really had a good time with this one, I went back to the watercolor paper, and really enjoyed painting on the paper this time, so, I must not have forgotten how (just being funny).

I sketched the cat, and had to erase it a couple times, first time, I had the head too big, then I had the head too low and the body wasn't in the correct position to get most of the foreleg in, I like to touch on at least 3 sides of the paper (so the composition runs off the page on 3 of the 4 sides), so, I put it higher on the page, I'd say this painting is about 9" x 12" somewhere in that neighborhood, I like to put the eyes in right away, so I started there, and then laid in a wash of beige/brown/black to get the tail and the cat's back in, then I got the pink out, my friend is very fond of pink so I know she will love this. I did the background wet in wet, that was the first layer, after I got that in, I had to let it dry. Then I started fine tuning the cat, I really enjoyed painting this, so it went rather well. I decided to punch up the background, So I put in a darker wash of pink, it was too flat so, I decided to shade it, bluish on the left and peachy on the right, still to flat, so I splattered, first a bit of pink, it didn't show up enough, so I added some purple to the pink and threw that, then I threw some water, anyway, I like the texture. When that was dry, I decided to put whiskers on him, they didn't show in the photo, but I know cats pretty well so I put them in, and then I decided to get the liner brush out and make some hair shapes on the edges, I think this painting turned out really well, and I know she will love it, and I think you will too, sure hope so anyway.