Cat of the Month 03/08: Muffy
OK, this is a little late, but the cat of the month is ... drum roll please—Muffy! As I write this, she is happily squirming around on my lap, purring out her contentment. Muffy is around 17 years old and may or may not be Cricket’s sister. She and Cricket were born at my mom’s house just down the road, then moved with me to Bloomington and to Spencer and now we’re all back in Brown County where we started.
Muffy is a beautiful, cranky, sweet, very needy kitty. She makes her presence known with first gentle then ever more insistent taps of her paw on my pant leg. Anytime I sit down (and I mean anytime, anywhere) it is clearly an invitation for her to sit on my lap. When I am painting, she’ll often sit on the table that holds my palette and paints, inching closer and closer to me til I’m close enough to be poked by her paw—claws gently extended. I’ll put her down on the floor, she hops back up, over and over.
Muffy and Alex have a love/pretend hate relationship. She loves to snuggle with him and he pretends to hate it—growling as she curls up against him. Once she’s settled he looks pretty happy, though.
We often get to see an artist's finished work, but don't usually get to see the steps leading up to the end result. So this time when I set up my canvas, I stopped every so often to take a picture. To keep it fairly simple, I've just included the basic progression. I started by mapping out what goes where- horizon line, tree, etc. Then I blocked in colors and shapes, eventually moving the tree a little and adding a second tree. When things were basically where I wanted them, I played with the sky- clouds, or no clouds? And I fine tuned the textures and details. The hard part was remembering to stop every so often to take a picture. Eric came up with a title, something I often have trouble with. Voila! All done. 
