Cat Painting Tutorial from Watercolor on cold press paper

Peanuts, Popcorn, Candied Apples. Get your red hot merchandise right here. Curious Tabby at Zazzle!

Watercolor Video Tutorial Transcript - Painting of Curious Cat

I transfered my drawing onto Cold Press Watercolor Paper

At this point, I realized I had drawn the cat's left eye incorrectly.

Good quality watercor paper can handle a little gentle erasing.

I redrew the cat's eye directly onto the paper.

I put liquid masque on the cat's whiskers and the highlights of her eyes.

Putting down a lot of water in the background area behind the cat, I began dropping in color.

My desk is at a slant so that the paint runs down to the paper's edge.

I didn't want too hard of an edge around the cat, so I ran a barely damp brush around her silhouette.

I painted the cat's eyes with a wash of raw sienna.

While the raw sienna was still wet, I dropped in a green mixture.

I wanted the highlight on the cat'snose to be soft, so I kept mopping color away from that area instead of masking it.

I started working in the shadow areas.

At this point, I began adding local color.

The angle of the nose is a bit challenging, so I wanted to map in the colors early on.

My cat Tickles brought me this snake while I was painting... I slipped it into a plastic bag and put it outside in the sun. It had slithered away when I came back a few minutes later.

Later glazes softened the hard edges of the stripes I stroked in here.

I began to lose daylight.

I used short strokes to build up the pattern on the fur and to define her neck.

I used more strokes to build up the fur pattern.

I rewet the backbround area and dropped in more color.

I decided to soften the edges of the cat's face by lifting off color...

My brush dripped water onto the edge and the water bloomed into the background color. A happy accident!

I waited until the painting was completely dry, and fixed it best I could with some background color.

The black fur around the cat's eyes looked flat. I lifted some of the color with a damp brush and dropped in some blue.

Here I added a touch of blue for the nose's highlights.

I added shadows to the ears.

Waiting until the paper was completely dry, I rubbed off the masque.

I softened the whiskers with a damp clean brush.

I narrowed chunky whiskers by building up color around them.

Done!

Much time is spent waiting for watercolor washes to dry, so I keep a couple of projects going at once. I finished a painting of my cousin's dog this same weekend.