Kitty Portraits

We have four cats.  Two of them were mine and two of them belonged to my friend Kristin before we moved in together.  Now, they are just ours.  She wanted drawings of the cats to hang in the house and had been asking me for years to make them.  This year I finally did it as a Christmas present for her.  Here they are:

This is Sparks and Sooty or "The Boys."  This picture was drawn from a photograph.  They were the cutest, sweetest brothers and really did curl up like that to sleep.

This is Kitka and Annie or "The Girls."  This drawing was created from separate photographs of each them.  These two are not blood siblings (in fact Annie, the orange one is 9 months older than Kitka) and although they have learned to live peacefully together, there are never any cute kitty piles between them.

Here are the finished pieces framed on our wall:



"The Boys"
8"x10" oil pastels and colored pencil on watercolor paper

 

"The Girls"
8"x10" oil pastels and colored pencil on watercolor paper

This gift ended up being very timely because, unbeknownst to us, it would be Sooty's last Christmas.  He died the following spring from renal failure as a complication from a rare kind of lower urinary tract disease that he had been battling for years.  These portraits are a nice way to keep his sweet presence in our home and we will continue to enjoy them long after all of our fur babies have crossed over the rainbow bridge.

Family Tree

I designed this fun little treasure as a birthday present for my friend Kristin.  We have a bunch of nieces and nephews between us that have grown up as cousins and some of them were constantly asking how we were related.  Even though we met as adults and had no reason to assume that we were relatives at the time, we were thrilled when one day, through a crazy coincidence, we discovered that we were actually fifth cousins once removed!  Small world!

This hangs in our house and now when the kids come over to play, not only do they "think" they are cousins, we can prove that they really are.


18" x 24" digital print on sentra board

I'm happy with the way this turned out and love the overall look and feel of the finished piece.  It's hard to see in the photo, but the text and frame are dark brown and the tree is a sepia.  Against the textured background the finished product has a little bit of a burned wood feel that is really cool.