"Three Cats on Stairs" portrait finished!

“Three Cats on Stairs” (Grace, Bonnie, and Morgan). My client's photo of Bonnie and Morgan waiting for her on the stairs to her bedroom gave Tammy the idea to portray her three cats on stairs. Grace and Bonnie are still alive. Morgan has gone on ahead to the Bridge.

My final touches on the stairs:

— After I created the wooden moldings on the front of each step (shared with you in a previous post), the stairs still looked too flat. So I darkened underneath the lowest stair tread and darkened very slightly above the top stair tread, to “contain” the arrangements of cats with darker borders on all four sides of the artwork. If I did it correctly you won’t notice those two stair-backs are darker than the middle two.

— I lightened strips of the white wall moldings running up either side of the staircase, letting those highlighted strips fade to the light-grey paper color toward the top, as if the staircase is rising into darkness.

— The tops of the stair treads (visible on the two lowest steps) was still light grey. That didn’t look right. So I added a light-brown top to those two, to match the wooden molding on the front. Now the staircase looks 3-dimensional and realistic.

— And last but not least I signed it. I’m a little bit superstitious about my signature being the last thing I put on an artwork.  😄

🎨 Prismacolor pencil and watercolor on “Flannel Grey” Canson Mi-Teintes paper. 20 x 26 inches.

“Three Cats on Stairs”

(Grace, Bonnie, and Morgan)

Commissioned by Tammy Cunningham.