Painting with a Twist: Paint your pet

My mom visited a few weeks ago and we were able to make it to one of my favorite places, Painting with a Twist! A few weeks before my mom visited I asked her to look at their calendar to see if there was anything she wanted to paint the week she was there. Luckily, the "Paint Your Pet" class was open on Wednesday night. My mom has been talking about painting a few of her cats forever, so this class was perfect timing.

I decided that I would paint one of her cats instead of painting one of our cats. I'm not quite sure where I would put a painting of one of our cats. :) Mom emailed photos of two of her cats, Minnie, a gorgeous black and white cat and Julius an sweet orange tomcat to Painting with a Twist. The instructor, Leann, penciled an outline of the cats on canvas before we got there so we would have a good starting place. We started out by tracing the cats pencil outline with watered down paint. Then we started to fill in the colors, black and whitish gray for my mom and a multitude of oranges and browns for me. We had great help from our instructor Leann. It knew this class would be difficult, but it was a lot harder than I expected. However, the background on my painting was just blue sky and a gray wall, my mom's painting had yellow flowers and (what ended up as red)a reddish background.

She did a great job on Minnie's face, especially her white fur between her eyes and wisps of her black fur. Leann helped me quite a bit at the end of my painting I was getting worn out and it was just difficult to get some of the fur looking just right. There were only 3 of us in the class, so we had lots of one on one attention, which is certainly important in a class like Paint your pet.

You start by outlining the cats in black.

Then you fill in the background (as you can see my mom started off with a yellow background)

Then you fill in the rest, it's not really that easy though. It was great to have a small class and the instructor there to help with the details!

The (almost) finished paintings. My mom wanted to finish her flowers at home. But look at minnie's face (the  black and white cat) awesome! Both cats are a wonderful representation of their personalities.