Another interim ticking-over piece on the principle that the best thing to do when you think you can’t keep going is to keep going. Usually getting stuck happens when I’m ‘between themes’; one has just come to an end and a new one hasn’t quite begun. I’m frozen in an ungainly straddle over the chasm between what was and is done, and what hasn’t yet come into focus. So I’ve resorted to cats again.

This is a photobomb by elder cat George who shoved his face into a ground-level wildlife camera.

The base is a kind of putty-coloured acrylic gesso on canvas and I had a silhouette in mind for good reason – the only clearly defined feature was the eyeball, the rest being implied by different degrees of blur. Naturally, that meant inventing ears and a head shape which was less easy than I’d thought. These first iterations also had a cartoon feel to them which I was not seeking.

I needed to lose the silhouette which meant imagineering a background – where was he? what did that look like? I came up with a nightscape in shades of grey and then worked up the colour of that one eye so that is the only colour in the scene.

These are the final two images; the first a photograph which my camera adjusted to make the dark areas lighter (it’s a common and irritating feature), the second a counter adjustment made in Rebelle7 using a digital water colour wash to restore the dark saturation which I can see in reality. Rebelle mimics the behaviour of real paint and I’d adjusted this to keep the canvas ‘flat’ so I could use very dilute paint and not have it run everywhere. The end result is smoother than the original; possibly because of the medium, but also perhaps due to the different way I apply paint at small screen size (hand and wrist) versus a larger canvas (arm and shoulder).

I was aiming for something more painterly than the cartoon image but I suspect the subject matter would always override that ambition!