Cat Farmer

Once again, I’m sorry for not blogging for a few days.  Busy with work although I’ve been finding time to paint.  It’s sometimes not easy finding the chance to sit down and concentrate on writing about it!  A few days ago, I wanted to try out some products I bought some time ago from Jane Davenport’s line.  They are just as good as any but I suppose she markets her own stuff to those that follow her work and focus on character portraits.  I tried her permanent alcohol markers (Smooth Markers) and mini pans of watercolours (The Color Institute Neutral Palette).

I was so immersed in my painting that I forgot to take a photo of the initial outline of it!  Ah well, at least you get the gist.  Photo quality is not great as it was taken in the evening under bad light conditions.  As you can see, I firstly traced the outline with the markers and then filled it in with the watercolor.  The combination works really well.  In particular, I liked how it merged in well for the hair.  Unfortunately, the background was a bit of a mess.  I tried the Faber-Castell gelatto sticks for the first time.  They are water-soluble crayons like the Neocolor II but tend to leave streaks. which was disappointing considering the reputation of Faber-Castell.   Perhaps I need to find out how to use them properly!  The rest of the background was washed down with some yellow Ecoline ink to give it some brightness and hence take the attention away from the mistake.

I was intending to make the background an autumn shade of yellow, orange and red but with the streaky red bits, it didn’t work out that way.  And hence, I thought this would be an opportunity to play around with these cute rubber stamps I bought at the Creadoe art fair a few weeks ago!  They are a variety of cats and so I took some of them and stamped away using a grey Archival Ink.  Black would have been too strong.  With that same ink and with a sponge, I stencilled in some spots on the Little One’s fancy hat.  As stencilling would be too cumbersome on the small space for the outfit, I merely stamped spots with that grey ink using bubble wrap.  The eyes were drawn in using the permanent markers for the green and for the lashes, Faber-Castell’s black marker and Pebeo Deco Markers in silver.  Thinking that the painting still lacked some character, I pasted on some flower cut-outs from origami paper.  I suppose I could’ve added more but for now, I think I will leave it as it is.

So a cute experiment combining alcohol markers and watercolours and finally being able to use the variety of cat stamps.  Quite pleased how they turned out in the end although not sure about the Gelatto sticks.  That needs to be practised with more.  Look forward to doing more of such experiment again and using the stuff in other paintings!  By the way, the gigantic head and huge eyes of the Little One makes her look all the more kawaii chibi.  With the unexpected litter of little cats, I decided to let her take charge.  The Cat Farmer!