There has been a clowder of fabric pet portraits and pet memorials on my design wall this fall/winter. What’s a clowder? Clowder: a group of cats.
Over the 16 years that I have created custom pet portraits and memorials, the overwhelming number of customer requests have been for dogs. However, these past 5 months the number of furry felines I made into pillows or canvas mounted cat art has definitely been a clowder’s worth.
Whether it was a memorial wall hanging, cat pillows for birthday presents, or special Christmas presents, each of these creations delighted the recipient and gave my customers a special warm feeling of gifting a one-of-a-kind pet portrait.
Shakespeare
Paul
In creating fabric pet pictures, there are certain aspects that are critical in the creation process of a cat portrait. These are:
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- Capturing the correct essence of “cattitude”
- Blending of fur
- Representing their ever-changing eyes
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Here’s how I intertwine these concepts into my pet portrait art:
Cattitude
Frequently I receive multiple photographs for a pet portrait. This allows my client and I to determine the best reference photograph for the personality traits or look of the cat that they want portrayed.
Below are four enlarged photos of Wispa, a recent pet portrait commission. While I received others, these four photographs struck me as the best possibilities. I’ve written the message I interpreted from each photo below.
Far left: the head tilt says “Hey there! Are you going to play with me or what?”
2nd: Paws on chair arm clearly state “We both know who’s queen of the house, don’t we?”
3rd: Eyes down and sitting posture speak of her intention “I’ll pay attention to you after I’m done fluffing myself”
4th: Straight on view whispers “Stare into my eyes and you’ll come under my spell”
My customer narrowed it down to the two on the left. In our email exchange, I spoke about the artistic differences between them. The first one would show off Wispa’s fluffiness on her face and chest area in greater detail, a more intimate pet portrait; the second would project a majestic, yet casual nature. As seen at the beginning of this post, she chose fluffiness.
Just to be clear, any of these photos would have made an amazing pet portrait pillow and surprised the birthday girl to no end.
Wispa’s final reference photo
FABRICating CAT EYES
As mentioned in two previous blog posts, ( Making a Pet Portrait: Cooper’s Memorial Pillow and Their Eyes Speak: Different Techniques for Fabric Pet Portrait Eyes) I talk about how eyes are critical to capturing the essence of any beloved pet. Often this is where I begin laying out the fabric since the eyes then frame the rest of the creation process.
Shakespeare’s close-up
With solid color eyes as with Shakespeare, an eye itself is usually three pieces of material and thread painting for the eye sparkle. The surrounding eyebrows and eye-circle fur can be just one piece or several appliqued one on another.
The marbling effect of cat’s eyes is captured by finding a scrap fabric that has lines within the pattern or painting that look on fabric. In Paul’s eye below, the tiny vines of green material give just enough contrast to create an impression of marbling. For Iris’s eyes, I painted her eyes and used fabric marker to achieve the depth within her eyes. Both have eye sparkle: Paul has thread for his and Iris uses white acrylic paint.
Paul’s eye
Iris’s eyes
For memorial portraits, the connection between the cat and owner is often the aspect that my customers choose to emphasize. Being able to look into those adoring eyes and feel warm memories come flooding back can be such a powerful healer. In The Art of Remembrance:Pet Memorials in Fabric, I speak of how healing from pet loss is a journey and creating a pet portrait memorial can be a part of the healing process.
WHISKERS
Some of the recent cats had whiskers that were longer than their faces. It just made me laugh each time I looked at their photos on the studio wall!
Whiskers can be created with thread or fabric markers. I usually do them with thread, just to emphasize the texture.
In Iris’s portrait above, the whiskers are several strands of embroidery thread. I’d like to say it was because I wanted to emphasize the color difference against the dark brown face. That, however, would have required forethought. Nope, this was simply that I forgot to thread paint the whiskers with regular sewing thread.
My options were to either 1) rip open the seams, sew the whiskers on, and resew as a wall hanging or 2) sew the whiskers without disassembling the completed portrait. With my customer’s permission, the whiskers were done with embroidery thread. This was an “oops” that, in my opinion, turned out for the better in the overall design.
Here’s a close up of Gabby’s whiskers. Created with sewing thread, these were done with free motion quilting, a technique where the material is guided by one’s hands as opposed to the feed-dogs of the sewing machine.
The Queen of Whiskers in this round of cat portraits, however, is Wispa. If you compare her pillow at the top of the blog and reference photo, you will see that I didn’t even approach the number of whiskers she has.
Fabric Fur
With cats whose coats are solid, colorpoint, bicolor or tricolor, it is usually easy to find corresponding fabrics. For me, it’s a question of whether I search the Fat Quarter totes first or the Big Lengths totes first. Even some of the tabby cats can be simple to create.
It is the tabbies where the overall color is blended onto a different color background or “field” and the torties and torbies that require a deeper fabric search.
Gabby
As you can see with Gabby, the patterns of the fabrics lend an air of patched fur and give that depth or field. In this portrait, I also used fabric markers to create some black fur lines as well as the dots on her snout.
Here is Iris’s portrait. While she wasn’t created recently, since she was included in this blog post, Iris deserved to have her full portrait to be shown here. The red is a velveteen fabric, soft like the blanket in her reference photo. It just sets off her piercing eyes perfectly.
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