Featured Artwork: The Mystery of the Daily Sketch I Never Posted

While this may look like any other daily sketch it’s unique in its provenance—I sketched it, but never signed or dated it, and most interesting of all, I never posted it here! So I decided I would just do it now. But first, I wanted to see if I could solve the mystery of why I never posted it and never realized it, and guess the date or at least the year that I sketched this and who were the two cats? And give it a name!

My first intuition was to say it was an early autumn sketch by the palette of colors, and by the postures of the two cats it was Giuseppe and Mr. Sunshine or Mewsette.

But that’s my guess! Let’s see how I did.

Trying to organize about 1,000 daily sketches…

I have a lot of daily sketches of my cats. I’m really guessing it’s up near 1,000. I’ve been organizing my daily sketches as I’ve been reposting them for the past few months, trying to get to a good total count and also visually organizing them into styles and color palettes and themes and media, so I’ve got a better visual grasp on what’s there and what I’ve posted than a couple of years ago when I first thought about creating a collection and possibly planning an exhibit.

Most of my daily sketches I left in the sketchbooks I used for safe keeping, and keeping them in order. But I use several types of drawing paper and watercolor paper so I have a lot of different sketchbooks, and some papers are not in books but were a package of free sheets or scraps of paper I used from larger pieces. Several years ago I wrote the dates each sketchbook spanned and some notes on what was inside on the cover that helps me to find them when I need to, but the free sheets are slipped between the sheets of an 11″ x 14″ pad of lightweight acid-free drawing paper, theoretically in the order I sketched them.

But I used different papers and media with each sketch so while individual books are in order, all the sketches are mixed among all the sketchbooks. The only way I can really keep track of them is by my posts here on The Creative Cat and I’m really grateful for my sketches and all my categories of posts that I found a plugin I can use to save my posts in a PDF or Word document, or in HTML, by category, date or any other category criteria I want. I’ve been compiling that and coordinating it with the physical sketches.

Finding this sketch among all the others

All that organizing was the only way I would have realized that I had one daily sketch that I’d never used! Last week I was checking to see that I still had the original of “Energetic Bath”, sketched on 9″ x 12″ Pastello paper, each a different color with that deep textured finish, so I’d find it in the 11″ x 14″ pad with all the other loose sketches in it.

On the way to Energetic Bath I found this one that in its style and colors and paper color looked very familiar. I checked the lower right to see the date and saw there was neither date nor signature! I checked The Creative Cat online but without a date I’d never find it, so I looked in the folder of daily sketches on my computer. Luckily I named them beginning with the date I sketched them because I might call a sketch something different each time I looked at it, and sometimes I named a sketch one thing, then used a different name when I posted it. But just scrolling through that folder looking for sketches on this color of paper turned up nothing. I went back to The Creative Cat and looked through the media file sorted for daily sketches and again looking for this color of paper and, again, nothing!

Why did I never post it?

There were times I did more than one sketch in a day and decided I’d hold onto one for a later date. I’d still sign and date it, though, unless I decided I wanted to make some changes to the one I saved. Sometimes I didn’t like the way a sketch turned out, and I can see the lime green here isn’t balanced with the yellow at the bottom. I may have wanted to remove the lime green or add yellow to it.

But I’ve often told people that with each image I create, I am totally disappointed and don’t like it when I first finish it. That’s even when I feel intuitively that I can’t add anything more to the image that would carry my vision any better. Yet when I give it a break, sometimes just a few minutes and sometimes a few days, in some cases a few years, I look at it and wonder what I didn’t like about it. I know it’s because I make so many decisions as I work, and some decisions are not consciously made, that each one is a point of doubt for me to ponder, even if that ponderance isn’t conscious either.

And that’s what I think happened here. I put it aside to take another look at it, and for whatever reason at that time I just moved on. Because I thought I’d work on it some more I didn’t sign and date it, I don’t until I know it’s done both for technical reasons, if I need to rework that area, and for timing—less for my signature than for the date, I’m recording when I decided it was finished as I described above.

But when did I sketch it?

Well that was fun to try to distinguish, but all this organizing helped that too! I knew I’d moved through different trends in styles and media and color use all through my daily sketches, and that use of purple and lime green was particular to a couple of specific times as well as that color of the paper. So I started there.

Starting with colors of pastels

I started substituting purple for black in the cats fairly early on because it’s a good strong and dark color, but still vibrant, and used it all the way through my sketches. But adding the cooler blue in the shadows and highlights means it’s likely a cooler month because that’s when we have cooler light coming in the windows where they most often sleep.

And the lime green background at the top, that gave me a more specific year and time of year. I seem to have “discovered” it in contrast with using purple or blue in a sketch in spring 2012 and it re-emerged each spring kind of representing the new leaves on the things growing outside in our yard outside the windows where they often slept or they reflected and cast that tone of light inside. But that lime green also appeared here and there in September and a few in October as the green leaves began to mingle with yellow outside the window or casting inside that tone of light. I seem to have moved away from the lime green as a contrast color by 2014.

But there is also yellow around and below the two cats and I seemed to use the combination of lime green and yellow in autumn sketches, I would guess as the leaves in our silver maple and river birch trees turned more fully yellow, and I went on to use strong yellows all and dropped the lime green.

So on that evidence I would put this sketch in September, rather than October, because the lime green was much less frequent in October.

And on to paper color

I seemed to use that shade of paper more often in 2014 and 2015, and both in winter, like December and January, and summer, like July to September.

Making up a date

So anything is possible, I could easily jump around in all the variations and decide to do something completely different from what I’d been doing at a certain time when I did this sketch, just because. But I would still trend toward certain colors at certain times of the year. I’ve always been like that.

For the year, I seem to have used the lime green most in 2013 and 2014, while I used that color paper most in 2014 and 2015. Let’s take the overlap year: 2014.

For the month, because it’s got both lime green and yellow, and that happened most often in September, I’ll start there. Because I used the blue in addition to the purple, that would also indicate cooler light which would be September.

Beyond the month, I could look at the dates I actually posted in each year and find one in the likely timeline when I didn’t post in September 2014. There were too many and a guess would be only random, not based on any evidence that I can come up with.

So, September 2014 it is.

And who is it?

The cat whose face we can see, that’s Giuseppe’s nose and ears, and he often slept in that kind of a curve. The cat whose face we can’t see, my sense is that it’s Mr. Sunshine. Both Mewsette and Mr. Sunshine would sleep like that and let Giuseppe press his head into their bellies. But this cat is more upright, and that was more of a Mewsette habit, while Mr. Sunshine more often slept on his side. The ears look more like hers too, smaller than Mr. Sunshine’s, but that’s something that could have been less accurate. But it looks like it’s Giuseppe and Mewsette.

And the title?

This morning while considering what to name it when I scanned it and then set up this post I went through these three titles:

1. Warm Spring Nap—warm for the colors and it’s getting warmer out side and nap for the obvious, but nope, I really think it’s autumn, so…
2. Warm Nap—nope, nap is not descriptive enough, so…
3. Warm Cuddle: I think that works!

And the winner is…

“Warm Cuddle,” pastel on Pastello, 9 x 12, Undated Daily Sketch, likely September 2014 © Bernadette E. Kazmarski

What do you think in any of those categories?

I have no perspective on my sketches because they are my cats and they are in my head, but I have no idea of the perspective of someone who is just looking at them. Let me know what you think!

 

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Daily Sketches 2011 to 2015

I think I accomplished what I'd set out to do three years ago today, a challenge to me and entertainment and enjoyment for you: to create a quick sketch of my cats each day as a way to practice and experiment, and present the sketch on that day with no editing, no waiting, no excuses, just to do the sketch and share it.

Read more about the reason for the daily sketches in Daily Sketches: the Idea, Most Popular, Awards.

Click here to see other daily sketches.

For a gallery of the ones available for sale, visit Portraits of Animals in the “Daily Sketches” section.

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A collection of 34 images of feline artwork

The award-winning* Feline Style Sampler

Now in its third printing since 2013! Daily sketches, illustrations, commissioned portraits all in a small coil-bound gift book. Click here or on the image to read more or find this book on Portraits of Animals.

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*Certificate of Excellence, Cat Writers' Association 2014 Communications Contest

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Buy an Original or Print of a Daily Sketch from Portraits of Animals!

The original sketch is still available. Please let me know if you’re interested.

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Copyright

All images and text used on this site are copyrighted to Bernadette E. Kazmarski unless otherwise noted and may not be used without my written permission, although links to your site are more than welcome and are shared. Please ask if you are interested in using and image or story in a print or internet publication. If you are interested in purchasing a print of an image or a product including it, check my animal and nature website Portraits of Animals to see if I have it available already. If you don’t find it there, visit Ordering Custom Artwork for more information on a custom greeting card, print or other item.

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