⏳ In Progress: Detail Layer + Background

My friends' cats (Momo & Milo) are the perfect muse!

Cats are so majestic and picturesque, and I feel blessed every time my friends send me pictures of theirs.

Painting animals with fur is a little intimidating. The challenge is capturing the texture and essence of the fur without painting every single strand.

For Momo and Milo, I approached the fur by painting larger shapes based on the direction it was growing. Before adding color, I also tried underpainting with burnt sienna. Since they are lighter-colored cats and the canvas was white, the warm underpainting made it much easier to see where everything needed to go.

I used the underpainting to map out the different values first, so I would not have to guess later. This helped a lot and removed some of the mental work once I started building the next layers. One tip I learned was to use a black-and-white filter on the reference photo so the differences between the light and dark values are easier to see.

My next step is to add the final details: a few prominent fur strokes, whiskers, highlights, and then the background.

These are probably the first paintings I am going to varnish because I plan on giving them to my friends. Varnish is basically a clear protective coating that goes on top of the finished painting.

I am a little nervous about this part because I read that you should wait around six months for an oil painting to fully cure before varnishing it, but we’ll see 😄 It has already taken me months to work on these paintings one layer at a time, so I guess waiting is part of the process.