The Cat by numbers

Having completed The Parrots, I believe I mentioned that I would be painting a cat as my next paint by numbers artwork.

I am pleased to announce that The Cat is now finished. And I am ever so pleased with the result.

However, it has not been without its challenges. Teeny tiny numbers not even visible with a magnifying glass I lent from my neighbour’s son. Boy have they got fancy. It has LED lights and a small super magnification circle.

See that little round bit on the right hand edge? That’s it. Those numbers you can see are so small I had to rewrite them in by hand with a very fine pencil to fit them in the space. Really.

I discovered several other interesting challenges too –

I had gone under and over outlines. Some by so much I had painted over the number in the next space. That gave me a dilemma. What colour was it meant to be? Not even the paper draft always resolved that. So it was up to me. In the end of course it does not really matter. Those little dilemmas and problems simply mean that the painting has been personalised by me.

I also found what looked like huge, bottomless craters with NO colour in them. Looked at by the naked eye, they were but pinpricks. But, they were there. And I had to get rid of them.

The whole painting, like the parrots, had to be retouched. Like any paintwork the retouching makes the colours more vibrant. And it fills those craters. But – and this is a really interesting BUT – I no longer had the paint numbers to guide me in what colours to use. And the paper draft was useless. It was well nigh impossible to find the minute space I was looking at on the canvas. Some of the colours are so close in tone that I found it impossible to distinguish where one started and the other ended. What happened of course is that I painted over some colours without even realising that is what I was doing.

It turned out OK. Actually, more than OK. I think.

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