Puppies and Kitties and Sycamore Trees

So a few weeks ago, K-Corn and I celebrated our two-year anniversary. So I created a small project for myself: creating a digital painting of our lovely cat perry:

And then I decided while I was at it I should also go ahead and make a painting of Walter (b-hole pictured above)

So I came up with these two images. I spent a lot more time on the one of Perry than Walter:

As the photo lab tech at Walgreen's pointed out when I picked up the * X 10's I had made, Walter's the perfect cat. no mouth means you save a lot of money on cat food and cat litter. Of course he's always running into things because he has no eyes. I may still go back in and those in.

So beyond the fact that I knew she would enjoy having some interesting pictures of our kitties, my other motivation for doing these was to experiment with some features of Photoshop CS5 and refamiliarize myself with the program. Most of my photoshop experience has been in photo editing and correction, rather than painting anyway. I had also at this point just finished making this tree in photoshop and had a lot of fun doing it and was ready to make some more stuff:

The motivation for all of this ultimately is related to my interest in 3D modeling. I saw a couple of animated shorts called Meet Buck and Salesman Pete and the Amazing Stone From Outer Space ! and I was really impressed by the painterly textures of the characters and environments. They worked so well at fitting the style of the characters and distinguishing them from more mainstream 3D characters. So I wanted to spend a little time working in photoshop to experiment with making textures that had that sort of feel.

Anyway, I enjoyed making the perry and Walter paintings so much that I decided to keep going with it for a little while. I moved on to my sister's dog Frances:

and my big fat friend Dr. Furious Xavier Toots:

With this one of Toots I played with using a lot of very dark color values to give the black cat a little more texture and make it a little bit more interesting.

With these completed I decided to set up an Etsy shop to offer the custom pet painting service to anyone who's interested. We'll see if anyone bites, or barks or meows (sorry)