Cat Walk

A golden bush with tiny white flowers set among some salmon colored rocks. This is one small  part of the painting that has occupied my attention for the last several weeks. My last painting was the Coyote which also had a similar color theme. I knew from the first few brush strokes that this painting was destined to be better. It just felt right.

This painting certainly did not come without its challenges. I knew that I wanted to paint a Southwestern theme with dramatic, glowing rocks and sweeping vistas. That is easy to conceive but difficult to translate into natural looking shapes. I felt that I was a little lost while I sketched it out. Just a bunch of random shapes without a strong concept of how it would look when I painted it. Would there any any balance or accurate perspective? I was not at all sure about that.

I had one minor flash of inspiration when I decided to put a window in the rocks.

A cat's paw.

A lovely mouth.

Because I had no reference photos of Cougars in the position that I chose for this painting, I had to do many minor adjustments to the cat's anatomy to make it look right to my eyes.

A vertical look at a horizontal painting.

Hopefully it all comes together when you see the entire painting. The actual painting looks much different. For some reason when I photograph a painting it always comes out over-exposed. I adjust the brightness in photoshop, but when I put it up on the blog, my adjustments sometimes go away.

The shadows of this painting are much stronger than the photo indicates, especially on the left hand side.

This painting, Cat Walk, 18x24" is one of the best things that I have done in a long time.