Daily Sketch Reprise: Magic Carpet, 2014

Bernadette February 15, 2019 0 Comments black cat, black cats, cat art, cat artwork, cat sketches, cats, watercolor

inkand watercolor sketch of two cats — “Magic Carpet”, ink and watercolor, 6″ x 9″ © Bernadette E. Kazmarski

Giuseppe gives Mr. Sunshine a brotherly bath in a warm and cozy bathroom.

I loved the way they looked on that red rug and visualized a simple line sketch with the brush pen, but with color added. Although the bathroom is white and mint green I still pictured a warm yellow gold background around the red carpet, and keeping with the warm earth tones, the boys in brown. I wanted pretty nearly flat colors, just a little bit of intentional shading and variation, influenced, I think, by some art I’d been recently browsing, traditional, ancient art using natural colors, and modern homage to this style. This is pretty much what I visualized.

N.B.: Scanning and presenting digital art being what it is, I had to manipulate the red so much that I lost a few of the gentler details of texture and shading. It scanned as a bright, lighter, warm red, which was nice and initially I let it be, but decided it was the darker, cooler red that made the boys stand out more against the color. I wanted it to be really representative of the color I mixed and layered which as a deep but bright red, a little on the purple side. With rested eyes this morning and daylight, I tweaked the red a little more, and now on most screens it should resemble the original a little more closely.

Mr. Sunshine says, “You used that yellow because it matches my eyes.” Okay, Sunshine, maybe I did choose that sunshiny yellow because it’s darned close to the color of your eyes. But we didn’t notice that until this morning.

black cat with artwork — Mr. Sunshine appraises my painting.

I like this style, the black outlines, the yellow background, lots of red, so much I’ve used it a couple of other times since this sketch, as in “The Zen of Basket, After Toulouse-Lautrec”, and even “Listening to Granados, de Falla and Rodrigo“.

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