For one of my classes, I had three weeks to develop another project that had to depict some kind of guardian figure. To get the mental juices flowing, the suggested things like an angel, a gargoyle overlooking a city, medieval castle guard, and Native American deities. This one came to me quickly. I decided to do something with Bastet, the ancient Egyptian goddess of cats, fertility, and more. She has a human body but the head of a cat. In the early days of her mythology, it was usually a lion head, but later it was a domestic cat. I found a good image to work from that I loved:
(Found at https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bastet_dame_katzenkopf.jpg)
Her ears are tall here but she looks so sleek. The next step in the project was to figure what she’d be doing in the painting. I brainstormed a few things, but right away an idea I loved came to me: TNR (trap-neuter-release). I had this image in my head of her leaned over, looking at a feral mom and kittens hidden under a bush. I tried to expand a little and also came up with one other idea I liked, of her as a working veterinarian, but I still liked the TNR idea better. So I developed that one. First I did some value studies of my rough sketch, in marker. Here’s my favorite:
I then had to do the final line drawing and some color studies. When working on the line drawing, I was trying to find a good image of a bush online and really struggled, until I realized I could just go outside and take a picture of the bushes lining the front of my parents’ house. The wall behind it was rock, which was more interesting than the fence, so I went with that. Here’s the line drawing I came up with:
Then I worked on the color studies, which had to be done in acrylic, so that took some time. Because I had already decided on my color palette, they were all quite similar, as there was only so much variety I could introduce. Here are the three I did:
I got feedback on these that they were too simple and monochromatic (which is not true, as they used two different colors in addition to white, as the assignment specified). But whatever. The first one was my original idea, but I felt like it was too top heavy with the dark stone. Also, I was surprised at how pink the brown got when added to a lot of white. I tried reversing the dominant color of brown and yellow on the stone and bushes for the second one. But I didn’t like that either, because I really wanted the bushes to be yellow as it was more “natural” to me, and I didn’t like the stone being so yellow. So I tried toning down the darkness of the stone with yellow for the third study. But that one ended up too yellow. I did leave the cats pretty much the same across the three studies—I made the mom a calico, so used a very light brown for the white (to indicate shading) and brown and a yellow-brown for the spots. Two of the kittens are also calicos, including the escaping one, and two are “black” (brown here).
The final step was to make the actual painting, so I combined elements from all of the studies on the final version, where I went with brown for the stone but softened it a little with white (I’m not sure I did enough, though) and I made the difference between the leaves and the background on the bushes stronger. I stuck with light brown for the path but avoided pink, and made the carriers straight yellow. Here is the final version:
I’m overall happy with it, but I’m still not good at acrylics, unfortunately. Still, I like the colors and composition a lot, though I do think the stone still might be a little dark, and I wish I’d zoomed in just a little more. I could bring the right side up to the trap (maybe even over it), and then the cats would be much more visible (I know they’re hard to see). But I think it was a success.