Cat by the Windmill

I was just reminiscing over one of the morning walks from back in April during which a ginger cat came meandering around the field. In the background was a windmill. What an amazing scenery that was! Now living in the Netherlands myself, I then imagined red tulips being scattered around as apart from being the national flower, they are abundant at that time of the year. And now a digital painting about it!

Pencil Sketch

Here I used the Procreate app on my iPad and roughly doodled our little cat, windmill and sun. One of the wonderful things about this app is that you can easily add, remove or modify objects. Hence the windmill make look tiny in proportion to the cat but we can work on that later. More tulips can also be introduced later as well.

Start Coloring!

For the base coloring, I typically use a Medium Airbrush. A different layer is then applied for for every shape or color block which becomes handy for modifications as we see later.

As you see here, I have enlarged the size of the windmill, duplicated the tulips and relocated our cat. Background was then enhanced with some clouds and Leafy Mix (Jason’s Texture brushes, purchased as add-on), the latter of which I switched the lighting mode to Vivid Light. Then I introduced the vivid emerald green in the eyes and the tulip stems.

Adding Further Textures

And now the fun part begins! A great experiment with my own Texture brushes, ranging from Fur for the Cat (Eldar Zakirov’s sets) and Neon Lights for the Cat’s eyes and the sun rays. For the windmill, I went for a selection from the Magical Textures set. All these sets of add-on brushes are available on Creative Market. And here we have it, our ginger cat roaming around the fields by the tulips and a windmill nearby. How Dutch can we get…

…and how adorable this painting turned out to be of our little ginger cat! Once again, another fun play around with different possibilities on Procreate. The sky’s the limit! I especially enjoy experimenting with the various textures and lighting modes along with working with bright vivid colors. Looking forward to the next session, and who knows what I will come up with!