Gloomy

"Gloomy Days"

8"x5 1/3"

The subject of my creation is a sleepy cat laying down, with gloomy eyes. I chose to paint this because I want to follow my concentration by showing animals different emotions. The emotion I was trying to convey is sleepy, gloomy. I went to my friends house who has a couple cats and took many photos of them. I don’t have any animals, although I love them, so I had to use others pets.

I made this piece by using water color paper and I taped the border with painters tape. I started by painting the background first with acrylic paint, particularly an orangey/yellow color. I used a larger paint brush to cover large areas of space, like the background. Then I painted Andy (the cat), with smaller paint brushes, by mixing dark blues, reds and some yellow, creating grays and browns. This gave the cat many different values on the body and face.

Throughout this project I used space by playing with where I made my brush strokes. By making the brush strokes flow, I was able to use space, to open up my painting. I also used contrast by differentiating the different grays, browns, purples, etc. Over the course of this project, it evolved over time by layering paint. At first I wanted to make this painting more realistic, but when I got into it, I made the brush strokes free and less realistic. My next steps in this project would be to make the top eye smaller, and more proportional to the rest of the body. I also want to work on blending some parts of the face, to make the flow cleaner.