My Calendar Cat

I was so focused on finishing my 2022 calendar in November that I didn't stop to write any more blog posts about the work in progress as I had intended, so this is more of an afterword to the calendar process.

Although the theme of the 2022 calendar is the Year of the Tiger, as per the Chinese zodiac, I broadened it a bit to include other wild felines, and a few domestic cats, too, specifically my own. Since I went from doing just one calendar illustration a few years ago to doing 12 of them now, I have taken some liberties with the zodiac animal theme to give me a broader range of models. 

I thought I would feature a black cat for October, but I don't have a black cat. However, shortly after our tortoiseshell, Molly, joined our household in 2013, I took a photo of her posing like the cat in those arty "Le Chat Noir" posters, so I decided to use that as my reference and paint her all black. That's the sort of thing one has an artistic license for, after all!

I like to use watercolors, a medium that poses its own unique challenges but appeals to me for a variety of reasons, including that I like working on paper rather than canvas or other surfaces, and because I find the process of learning how to address those very challenges enjoyable.

I decided I needed to work wet-on-wet, that is, painting on wet paper, to evoke the furriness of my subject. There is a trick to it that involves learning to spot when the paper has partially dried just the right amount for the desired effect. If it's too wet, the paint will bleed too much. This is a learning curve for me, as you can see!

One of the beauties of doing paintings to be scanned and placed into a document is that I can tinker with them in Photoshop to fix or change things that aren't working for me. In fact, when I am feeling intimidated about painting the next picture, I tell myself, "It's not Art, it's illustration," and then I relax and get it done. The point is not to disparage my own work, but to remind myself that the raw painting doesn't have to be perfect.

More recently, when Molly was doing that stereotypic cat thing and squeezing herself into a box from a recent delivery, I took a couple of photos, thinking that a cat in a box would make a good December illustration, especially if I added some ribbon and made the box look like a Christmas package (more or less). At first she just stared at me like, "What are you doing?"

Then she obligingly reached a paw out to push something around (she can go crazy over very tiny things, like a dropped coffee bean) and I thought I would try to make it look like she was playing with some scattered ribbon. Although I initially imagined a scene with scattered wrapping paper and ribbons all around, I quickly realized that I would have an easier time completing the illustration if I kept the composition a bit simpler. And it was the last one I needed to finish the calendar, so I didn't want to drag out the process!

You can see how these, and my other illustrations, ended up looking once placed in the calendar here on Etsy.