A Purrfect Christmas Eve
Happy Christmas Eve! Are you and your kitties admiring your tree?
Well, who doesn’t like a nice holiday scene with a Christmas tree and a kitten and a cat and a cute little girl? This may look familiar as the cover of Patricia Fry’s Klepto Cat Mystery A Picture-Purrfect Christmas from Christmas 2015. I’d talked to Patricia about using this artwork for holiday cards and other items this year, and then realized I had to make a few modifications to it before it would fit well on a card and other things. The book covers are tall and narrow so I needed some extra image on either side, and the angel at the top was muted for the cover because that was where the title fell. I’ve added the extra art to the illustration, but not in time to release it for this holiday season. So we have next year to look forward to it.
Some of the reference images for the cover are taken from photos of my cats and my library, so I have extra connections to the content.
Patricia described a little girl with dark curly hair wearing a pink bathrobe and sitting with Rags and a long-haired white kitten looking at a Christmas tree as her idea. I immediately visualized the illustration. I had the purrfect photo of a decorated Christmas tree that I’d taken years before (2007) at my library’s tree-lighting event.
I pretty much knew what I wanted Rags to look like, even from the back, in the dark, with the light of the Christmas tree shining on the front of him so I didn’t really need a reference image. After 12 covers I know him pretty well! For the kitten I used the photo of another long-haired kitten I’d gotten to know earlier this, Samwise in a special photo of him and his brother Crayola looking up toward the bathroom window.
For the little girl I had a really blurry photo of my great niece Cassidy with my cats years ago, blurry enough that probably only I could really tell what it was but it was enough that I could work from it. I bypassed the bathrobe idea and just had pink pajamas which had feet so I didn’t have to draw her feet, that I’d found in my old books of stock line art for design. I completely fabricated the way the lighting fell on the figures. As I worked with it I lightened the tree to make sure you could see the figures in front of it and decided which of the background items would be included.
About the book covers
I’ve illustrated a total of 19 covers for Patricia. Use these to read more about them: Catnapped, Cat-Eye Witness, Sleight of Paw, Undercover Cat, The Colony Cat Caper, The Corral Cat Caper, Gallery Cat Caper, Mansion of Meows, Celebrity Cat Caper, Pawtners in Crime, Pawsitively Sinister, The Purrfect Lie, A Picture Purrfect Christmas, Meow for the Money, Claws for a Cause, Cabin FURvor, A MEOWvelous Witness, and Cats in Cahoots.
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.
Read about the reason for the daily sketches in Three Years of Daily Sketches.
Download your free desktop wallpaper calendar for computer or mobile, usually based on a daily sketch.
And don’t forget that each month’s Featured Artwork is also one of the free prints available on Portraits of Animals when you sign up for an account.
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. Subscribe to The Creative Cat Preview E-newsletter. © 2022 | www.TheCreativeCat.net | Published by Bernadette E. Kazmarski Weekly schedule of features: Sunday: Essays, Pet Loss, Poetry, The Artist’s Life Monday: Adoptable Cats, TNR & Shelters Tuesday: Rescue Stories Wednesday: Commissioned Portrait or Featured Artwork Thursday: New Merchandise Friday: Book Review, Health and Welfare, Advocacy Saturday: Your Backyard Wildlife Habitat, Living Green With Pets, Creating With Cats And sometimes, I just throw my hands in the air and have fun!
Copyright
Subscribe to my e-newsletter
PORTRAITS OF ANIMALS WEBSITE
FACEBOOK | TWITTER | LINKEDIN | PINTEREST | TUMBLR | INSTAGRAM | YOUTUBE| EMAIL
| PATREON
Impressionist Cats Keepsake from Portraits of Animals!
Getting ready for “Boxing Day”? Need a clever place to keep your keepsakes? This papier-mâché box has five of my cat paintings and sketches in pastel and an Impressionist style on the lid and four sides of the box, trimmed with bright blue. Box measures 7″ x 7″ x 7″. $20.00, includes shipping. Read more and order.
© 2016 | www.TheCreativeCat.net | Published by Bernadette E. Kazmarski
—
Weekly schedule of features:
Sunday: Essays, Pet Loss, Poetry, The Artist’s Life
Monday: Adoptable Cats, TNR & Shelters
Tuesday: Rescue Stories
Wednesday: Commissioned Portrait or Featured Artwork
Thursday: New Merchandise
Friday: Book Review, Health and Welfare, Advocacy
Saturday: Your Backyard Wildlife Habitat, Living Green With Pets, Creating With Cats
And sometimes, I just throw my hands in the air and have fun!
—
PORTRAITS OF ANIMALS WEBSITE
FACEBOOK | TWITTER | LINKEDIN | PINTEREST | TUMBLR | INSTAGRAM | YOUTUBE | GOOGLE+ | EMAIL
That’s sooo cool! ANd as lovely as all your work! We hope your Christmas was a furry, furry Merry one!
Thanks you guys! We hope your Hanukkah is proceeding happily. We need something like that here, now that we have so many cats in the house…hint, human.
It was really nice to read about how that picture came about.
It is always interesting to see inspirations and thought process involved.
The picture is lovely.
We are indeed admiring the tree and the snuggling 🙂
Hope you are too!
Merry Christmas !
Purrs Georgia,Julie and JJ
and Nancy
We are still looking like a warehouse around here, Nancy, but we do at least snuggle when we get to bed. We hope your Christmas was merry too!