Some Cat Art

Colored pencil drawing of Leonard. This was to try out the 10 color grayscale set of Blick pencils. They’re pretty nice and seem like great quality for the price. 5×7″ on gray Stonehenge paper. Eyes were drawn with a yellow oche Derwent Drawing pencil.

This is a pastel painting of my cousin’s ancient (18+ years old) cat. I’m amazed at how many colors I used for it, probably more than any other painting I’ve ever done. This is on a sheet of Mi-teintes. I did the underpainting over a pencil outline with hard pastels, then filled in with softer pastels (Rembrandt, Mt. Vision, Sennelier, and Great American, in that order). This is on the smooth side of the paper. The only black/white in this painting are the catchlights in her eyes, everything is done using optical tricks. I think that’s kind of neat.

Detail:

Painting of a cat in pastel

Pastel painting of my fur cat on slate.

Haven’t posted any traditional art in a while. Here’s a painting I did a while back of one of my cats. I primed a piece of slate with acrylic primer, then coated it with Art Spectrum Colourfix Primer and painted over it with soft pastels. It worked better than expected.

Pastel paintings

Pastels are my favorite painting medium due to their speed and ease of cleanup. Here are several portraits I’ve done over the past year or so on different papers.

Above: self portrait on Colourfix paper. This is a pretty cool paper, it has a very strong, textured surface. Apparently all the little holes are the result of a defect that sometimes happens when they apply the coating to the paper, but I don’t really mind the texture of them. This paper accepts many layers of pastel, so I began with a rough underpainting, more like a drawing, then built it up with my softer pastels on top. I can paint over stuff if I make a mistake rather than having to try and erase it.

Below: Painting of one of my aunts. This is on Pastelmat, which has a smoother, velour surface. It doesn’t accept as many layers, but the surface is very good for details and blending.


Below: detail