Big Kitty
by Patrick J. Reynolds

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     It is said that the eye of the artist is only explained by the artist . When I started this piece, the subject was to have a powerful, majestic look about him, however, as the painting evolved, with the many fall leaves and the relaxing atmosphere surrounding him, it seemed more appropriate to give him that “ I’ve just eaten, leave me alone” look. The goal here is to capture the onlooker for a moment and allow for a justified gazing period and bring you on a mental tour of the entire painting, a sort of “mental massage," something that cannot be brought forth by conventional “growling cat” paintings.

     I started off with a pencil study of the cat, using this method, I am able to have much more control over how I will structure the painting. Normally, this is done three or four times as I am rarely satisfied with the first draft. Care is taken to not leave out any important details, the one mistake most artists make is poor planning, you don’t want to be experimenting with the layout after you are underway. Using a pencil and eraser, I have the ability to explore the textures I want in the appropriate places. Here there are no rules, I use my fingers a lot to “smudge” the lead around giving the piece a softer appearance. In contrast to the soft smudges and fades I break out the erasers, all kinds of them, electric ones, hard ones, soft ones, they all have a special purpose, and it’s important to be able to exploit their every characteristic.

     Here is where I get on my wife’s nerves, I call her into the studio and ask if she thinks I should change anything! After that, I ask several of my friends if they would change anything. After I have thoroughly aggravated everyone to distraction, I then make a decision to move on to the next step.

1. Here I use a technique that I have always felt safe with, it’s called the wash. You can apply a wash with either a brush or an airbrush, I usually use both. First I make my base color, using mixtures of black, white, yellow, and brown. The black and white are used simply to get the value right, then the yellow is added slowly to pull out brightness, I call yellow the color of life, because just about every land based living organism has yellow somewhere In it. finally brown is added to give it depth. Before applying the color to the canvas, I made sure that the color was very thin, for two reasons, one it’s easy to erase two you can add color, but it’s hard to remove it once it’s applied. After the wash is dry, again I use the erasers to bring the details back up. It’s not hard to find yourself adding more paint than need be, so I have to constantly monitor paint viscosity. Com Art was the paint I used to make this wash, it has a lot of pigment so just a little did the trick!
2. Over the years, I have learned a good pallet for painting wild life, the best way to master this is to try to match live animal fur as opposed to photographs. Photo’s lie! There is a huge difference in the way the human eye sees photos versus the real thing. So when ever possible, use a live subject or reasonable replacement, obviously I didn’t bring a live mountain lion into my studio, so I visited the zoo. I studied the cats expressions, mannerisms, and of course color. Mainly, I noted how light passes through the fur, and bounces off it. The mountain lion has a coarse fur with little to no shine, and it changes color as it reaches the tip of every hair! Not an easy task, if you are an absolute realist. So thank God I’m not! I use a technique called gesturing. This dictates that I can use the proper colors and just enough detail to fool the eye. So here you can see that I simply started to pull in individual hairs with a brush in white, and only white. This made for a good foundation of fur which will be dealt with later. Now you can see that I have completely covered the subject with individual hairs I can move on to more fun stuff!
3. Here I have placed the first layer of color over the white hairs. Wow, what a difference! But there’s more, much much more.

4. I now do the whole process again!, this time placing more emphases on the lighter areas.
5. The tree branch was one of the most frustrating things in the whole painting. But it turned into the most fun. It was done by first spraying gold and letting it fully dry. Then I sprayed dark brown and black heavily, and if you have an Iwata Eclipse, you know how heavy you can get! While the paint was still wet, I used a piece of saran wrap to place over and onto the wet paint, then pulling the plastic at both ends, causing wrinkles, then lifting it. Sounds disgusting? Well it was, it looked pathetic. But it came to be much better when I got my pallet knife and scraped the canvas to achieve a bark look. Then I took individual pieces of bark and highlighted and shadowed them until I had a believable piece. Sounds easy, but I spent about two days of experimenting.
6. Now I went back into the fur one more time!

7. Here you can see how I made sure that the hairs where pointing in the right direction.
8. This time I added some darker tones to give the kitty some depth, I wanted the top of the head to fall back into the painting more than the rest of him.
9. Here I added some warmer hues to liven thing up a bit, I couldn’t wait for this part to get here!

10. The background was painted to not take anything away from the cat, but at the same time, not take anything away from the setting of the painting. I began by covering the entire background with a neutral warm base, then with soft loose lines inadvertently throwing in to the mix vines and branches with a darker color. The actual color here is really not important because of atmospheric distortion, this can be of any cooler hue. The leaves for instance tell you that it is early fall, and it is probably early in the morning, hence the dew drops! I wanted to convey a mood of relaxation, putting the viewer in a place where it is most likely fairly cool. The highlight of the whole background is the leaf hanging down with the light shining through it. I got real pleasure out of pulling this off! First I painted the back half of the leaf with toned down browns and yellows, adding reflections from the sun. On the other side of the leaf, or the illuminated side, I used full value yellows and browns to give it brilliancy.

     Further back in the background is more leaves and branches out of focus, Done almost exclusively with the airbrush because of the extreme control you can achieve without any thought. I could apply more of my efforts to creativity rather than the technical aspects. but more importantly their value has dropped as they go back. I was careful not to use black at full strength as this has a tendency to kill a painting! The reason is that the human eye usually recognizes about seven values per eye full. So keep this in mind for your next painting.

     Speaking of eyes, the one thing I believe an artist should concentrate the most on is the eyes of the subject you are painting. Here I knew the light source would do several things, It would both cast a shadow on and reflect off the eye ball of my subject. To take advantage of this I added some baby blue that I mixed using white, blue, and a tad of brown to reflect the sky. Draping down you’ll see lines which are nothing more than shadows from the delicate lashes of the eyelid. It’s very important to know how light plays inside an eyeball, in short, light enters the eye on one side but illuminates the other side. This is best illustrated by studying raindrops. Note that I use a simple technique utilizing the freehand stencil, this is an invaluable tool that should be in every artists arsenal this one is made by Artool, I find the right size circle to make the outer part of the eye. Then a smaller circle to illustrate the pupil.

     After a few small added details, and points of interests such as the lady bug I added (so the sales people at the gallery could have something to point out to gazing customers and use as a sales tool) I then went on to apply on coat of Damar clear to protect it from small scratches during transportation.

     The finished piece is then framed and shot in a professional photography studio and then prints are made of it, where it is then sold on the market for about $250 per limited edition print, (Edition size is 950) the original is then priced at $8500.00.

     Hope this helps in some way to lead you effortlessly down the road to success in fine art! And as always happy airbrushing!