My cousin Kari asked me to do a cat painting of her cats Nasse and Nasse. Of course, I said, and started sketching her cats from her instagram account @katteetaten. Beautiful little furballs, sketching cats is easy, they pose in such elegant postures, they’re like catwalk models. Heh…
Kari asked if i could skip using blue and red. Hm… I always use blue! It was surprisingly hard to start chosing color without using blue! But, I decided it would take me out of my comfort zone, which is a good thing! The sketches turned into this yellow cat! I later painted over the blue to make it more purple, to keep with Karis wishes. I posted it on insta, to see what feedback I got. kari was happy! But the more i looked at it, the more uneasy i got. It just wasn’t right…
I tried changing the background, making the cat lie on purple pillows with texture, and brightening the background, to work better with the yellow color. Still doesn’t feel right!
My neighbor Norma also paints, and I asked her: what do you think is wrong? She asked me what i wanted to show with this cat. I said, cuddly, at ease, laziness. Imagine the sound of purring, how relaxing that is. “What is that yellow color depicting? To me it says energy and action, Norma said. And as she said it, I realized she was right! The style also says energy and action to me, with the sharp edges and simplistic style. So, I started again, from scratch.
New motive, the two cats together, and this time, a totally different style. I used runny paint technique, spraying water on different layers of color. I kept this texture as the fur of the cats, and i think it makes them come alive 🙂
