Before and After

Sadly, before Christmas, Lucy, one of the two family cats (sister to Minnie) passed away after struggling gallantly with heart disease for several months. She has been sorely missed as she was part of the family for over 16 years and a constant joy to be around. I always looked forward to seeing her when returning home and she always made me laugh and smile. She had one of the most gentle, sweet, playful and loving characters I've ever seen in an animal.

As a tribute, of sorts, I have revisited an earlier painting of Lucy I'd previously 'finished', with the intention of completing it properly in her memory.

This link shows the original blog post I made a few years ago concerning the initial painting. Below is a side by side comparison of the two cat portraits.

Spot the difference! Which one do you prefer?

The medium is acrylic paint on canvas textured board. The painting has been framed and given as a gift to my parents who have it hanging in their dining room.

Slow Work Days

We all have them from time to time. Slow work days that is. And towards the end of my employment in my last job I had many of them. There simply wasn't enough work coming in to keep everyone busy, even after the company tried to run on a skeleton staff. So before the day of redundancy came, I spent my notice period occupying myself by carrying out what seemed like futile and menial tasks for the company's owners and secretly doodling in my sketch pad.

The latter part was great. I felt like I was finally getting paid to do something I enjoyed. It would have been even better if I wasn't doing it alone in a dark, windowless room measuring no more than 2 or 3 meters in either direction. (For some reason, the powers that be decided that seeing as we were to be made redundant, they might as well make the last few weeks of our employment there as unbearable as possible; separating everybody up, restricting our internet access and being thoroughly unpleasant at any given opportunity. I think they were hoping we'd walk and so save having to pay us...) But still, you can't have everything.

Below are a few of the sketches I did during that period, as well as some Whale-phant/Ele-Whale* doodles and a dinosaur flying a kite.

*a character I'm working on. More to come in future updates. Maybe.

The cat is my pet, Minnie, who I've sketched and painted before, viewable in earlier posts in this blog. The man is my Grandad. The horses were in anticipation of a painting I might attempt at some point. All were done very quickly (by my standards) with no real dedication to extreme accuracy, rather to being speedy.

Not as good as it should be.

Hmm, I meant to post this weeks ago, if not months... It's the final scan of a painting of Lucy, my cat. As mentioned in a previous post, there were a few things that made this picture a bit of a chore to do and trickier than it needed to be.

The main problem being the squinty eyes; much more difficult to paint than wide open eyes. She doesn't look quite right as a result. I think it shows in the finished product as, in my opinion, it's not as good as the painting of Minnie. The likeness isn't as strong either, so I'm a little disappointed. Still, consider it a lesson learnt; when painting from a photograph, make sure you choose a good image.

Surprise!

It's been a while. It appears I've gone the way of many Bloggers before me, having started off with good intentions, but then, err, forgotten.. yes forgotten, to post.

Actually that's a bit of a lie. I've not forgotten really. I've been meaning to post but other things keep on getting in the way. My health for one. Also, I've not really felt like I've had anything particularly worth posting of late. But to remedy that, here is a more or less finished scan of the painting of Minnie, my cat.

'More or less finished' in that I could keep working on it, but I'm choosing not to as I'd like to move on to something else. I'm not entirely happy with the background; with hindsight I think keeping it more plain and less busy would perhaps look better. Either that or making it as detailed as the foreground (Minnie), as opposed to the annoying In-Between I seem to have settled on. Next time Gadget... Next time.

Yet Another Quick Update.

Hot off the press, this is the current revision. I've been focusing on fixing the background this afternoon having messed it up somewhat a couple of days ago. It's a definite improvement, looking less like the work of a child and more like that of a man. A big powerful man. I'm in the experimental process of gauging how detailed to make the background whilst keeping the foreground the main focus.

More Work in Progress.

Just a quick update on the painting of my cat; I hadn't done any work on it for a while, but found time today to do a few hours. The results of which can be seen below. Unfortunately the scan has desaturated a lot of the colours and messed up the contrast (as with the previous images on this blog). But in real life it is looking pretty good! Honest.