Artist Statement: The idea was to replicate my cat in one of her normal settings which just happens to be my couch and she is doing her average thing pretending as if it is a mighty forest kingdom that she overlooks. I thought it would also be very cool if I did my cat Shallamar instead of my other cat Souka because I remember when my sister did her scratchboard a few years ago she did Souka. Not only was that for inspiration but I felt I had enough images of my cat Shallamar who is constantly sprawling out in open spaces. It’s almost like she’s a truck in a parking lot and takes up as much space as possible. I am trying to show her in her natural state of being in a way, and the goal was to get as much detail of her as possible.

I used what everyone else used, the fiber brush for the more highlight within a room, and I used the different scratch tools to get the details of Shally (Shallamar) down. The fiber brush was probably the one thing I used the most, other than the red handled scratching tool which was another thing I used quite a bit. The red handle scratch tool was what I thought the best for getting the detailed hairs of Shally. I also at one point used a ruler to match up some lines and to make things like my wall in the background as realistic as possible. I free handed this piece of scratchboard art, I don’t really know all the reasons why I did looking back now.

Again like I said earlier, I mainly got the idea for my cat Shally through the fact that my sister did my other cat Souka a few years previous to me. From there trying to find an image that was somewhat focusing on her rather than the background was a little bit tough because I did want to have some background in my image. So ultimately that's where I came up with the image that I did, she is on the side of my couch staring off at the TV in my living room. The only real practice I did was the value strip, I did experiment with lines on where I knew there was going to be a lot of white space on my work.