There have been complaints from some quarters that I have not drawn enough cats lately. However I have converted what used to be my blog for mostly cat drawings (catoftheday.wordpress.com) into a site for entirely swimming drawings (waterdrawn.com). So the cats must find a new home. Here.
Now I know, because I see the stats, that my sketchbook blog Cat-of-the-Day doesn’t get many views, and that’s a shame because this site, which gets a lot more views, has largely been about sales and exhibitions lately, and hardly any new art work… So, apologies if you are following both blogs, but I think I’m going to pop the occasional CotD sketch over here, too, so you know I do get a bit of work done, occasionally 😉 This is inspired by the unique and surreal Vobster Quay Glow Swim – 80 glowsticked heads, bobbing in a lake, everyone…
I promised you a cat bottom, so here it is! This one was taken from the very first post of my cat-of-the-day sketchbook blog: http://catoftheday.wordpress.com/2014/03/23/3/. It’s another mezzotint of course, printed from aluminium. The print is only 8cm square by the way, but if you want to see it quite close up, just click on the image. Here is the original sketch (below). Arthur is not really that stripy, but it was a starting point: And below – a few of the stages of making the plate:
I went back to the plate in my post ‘Mezzotint done improperly‘, and burnished a few features into my Spiky Cat. Now he looks like this: I also added a little more detail with the mezzotint rocker (before burnishing). He used to look like this: I think it’s an interesting effect, but I wonder if the approach has a wider application or whether it is mostly suitable for drawing cats like this? It would be interesting to find out sometime. Below is a photo of the printing plate as it now looks:
Art by Nancy Farmer 