How Lydia paints a cat portrait

Greetings Friends and fiends!

I thought I'd share my process on painting a cat portrait. It was done with bic pen, acrylic, and colored pencil. 

I was commissioned recently to paint a portrait of someone's beloved feline, who is unfortunately not long for this world. He requested a halo and clouds. This same awesome person has previously commissioned me for cat portraits including tentacles and non-euclidean architecture, so I added some strange flying sea jelly monsters because it fits this client and his loving pets.

TO BEGIN!

 First I lay in some quick paint to represent the body of the cat. This is purely intuitive. I let me eyes and brain do a quick calculation on composition. Its ok if its not perfect, as the details will be sorted out later. I choose a mid-range color close to main body of the cat.

Next I use BIC PEN to draw the contours of the figure. I calculate in my mind as I go, being careful to about measuring elements in relation to each other. As a teacher I almost cringe at the thought of my students doing the same thing. Ha!! Any corrections can be made in the painting stage, so I don't stress if I have a few re-drawn edges. 

 

Adding a background really helps to solidify the figure of the cat, and covers the excess paint that was outside the edge of the drawing. 

 

Above I've added some darker coloring to the fur, and made the ears pink. I like to start with mid-range to darker colors, so I can add in the highlights on top, - this also creates depth in areas where I only add some light.  I also added clouds to the background. 

 Here I've completed the eyes, added some striping and some lighter areas of fur.

Now I've spent more time on the markings of the fur, and re-established the darker stripes.

My favorite stage!! I've added the COLORED PENCIL. Notice how the dark paint allows the lighter colored marks to show more boldly. I've found that ~drawing~ the fur in with colored pencil feels a lot more natural and spontaneous than trying to paint the fur.   (btw, most of the whiskers are thin strips of paint - the white colored pencil wouldn't have shown up as consistently bright white)
I also added the halo to this stage. Mainly yellow ocher - and its somewhat translucent.

And Finally! The finished piece! I added detail to the background: Some fluffy clouds up front in colored pencil, and I drew in some creatures with the bic pen - I kept them translucent to keep them in the realm of imaginary. To the halo, I added a white strip in the center, let it dry, and went over the white with bright yellow to give it that bright highlight.

Below is a closeup comparison of the face before and after colored pencil, as well as another slim layer of acrylic paint.

And there we go! I hope this helps to shed some light (and not shed fur) on my process for painting animals. This is by no means my only method of working (animals aren't even the bulk of my work!) but it is my preferred method for getting lifelike qualities in creatures.
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Thank you! please feel free to share portraits you've done of animals in the thread. 

Also, if you would like me to paint your own beloved animal, please contact me though email for a quote. 
lydiaburris (at) gmail.com. 
Portraits start at $75 and go up. I also paint humans, manipulated faces, other animals, and plenty of other you-name-it-requests. :)

epic art day 1 - worked on Bizarre ABC = "Grim"

(posted in retrospective, as I did not want to post it at 5:00 am!)

For the first day of my epic art year, I decided to solidify my "G" drawing.
I have been working on an ambitious "Bizarre" alphabet series, all on 7.25" x 7.25
blocks ofwood - each piece gets more and more elaborate - up to and over about 60
potentialthings in the latest pieces - There is a lot of planning - I had created about
3 listsand about 3 drawings corrosponding to the letter I was working on. G has been
themost frustrating so far, because there is so MUCH I wanted to do and I couldn't
decide on a basic layout.
This is the first time I've decided to make the preliminary drawing digitally - by
scanning in some of my drawings so far and using stock images to get things in
place before I draw them. Normally I wouldn't show this, but I'm interested in expressing
behind the scenes here.



I worked about 6 hours on this. It doesn't look like it (most of the time was spent
finding images and placing them), but at almost hour 3, it got deleted on accident,
and I had forgotten to save. ACK!

Then I did the drawing in pencil on gessoed wood. No tracing, no transfers, just eye to brain to hand to pencil.



After today, I will go over the pencil with bic pen, and then color with acrylics.
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Insirations for this stems from my childhood interests in artists who tamed the
alphabet in their own artistic way - such as Edward Gorey and especially Mike
Wilks's "Ultimate Alphabet" - of which I *think* I have the book but if not, I
definiely have the game "Scrutineyes". (unfortunately, no good pics here)
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Lastly -
-Pay attention to the world around you:
Learn to recognize those things you don't see every day.
Record it in someway so you can remember. Otherwise,
your brain might eat the experience. It's exhausting trying to
recall little morsels of joy if you have a memory eating brain like I do.



(snapshot from an errand earlier)

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Um... One last thing. some last minute inspiration.
The last song I was listening to at 4:50 am on my last.fm player was a Paradise Lost song from the 'Draconian Times' album.
I noticed the album cover art and had to find the artist.

The artist is Holly Warburton. Her website is in construction, but a little google image search will show a few more samples.
That is all. I don't think tomorrow will be as full!
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Dont hesitate to comment, make suggestions, requests, and/or recommendations!