Completed Cat things

[Penny Noor]

12th of Fall 517AV
Early morning
Penny’s home

Golden rays peeked through her eyelids. Groggily she murmured to the tune of cacophonic meowing and a soft, twitchy nose pressed itself against her forehead over and over again. And it meowed and it meowed and it meowed.

“Alright, alright. I’m awake. Pipe down, will you.” Penny moaned, placing one hand on Lopi’s head, fluffing his long cuddly mane lovingly. Although she was a little irritated, having to wake up this early, and a mellow thudding in her head irked her, she could never quite stay mad at the cat. After the passing away of both her mother and father, Lopi was perhaps the most stable thing in her life. Which, if one was to contemplate it, was a truly depressing state of affairs for Lopi was, after all, a cat. And that just speaks for itself.

Lopi was always the first to be fed in this house. He was a little spoiled pompom, bouncing around carelessly on short paws as if everything he looked at belonged to him. Even Penny wasn’t just a human. She was his human. Every morning was the same routine. She’d be meowed out of bed by his demands, stumble over to the bag of kibble in the chest - stored out of reach otherwise he’d eat himself into an early grave - and fill a dish for him to eat as she lit the hearth and boiled some water for early morning tea. And then for at least an hour the happy, podgy cat and his human would sit together on the windowsill, sandwiched together as if they were irreplaceable parts of each other. There would be no Penny without a Lopi and no Lopi without his pretty Penny.

Suffice to say the windows to her apartment weren’t the most well constructed of windows and tiny gusts of wind poked their way around the cracks in the wood. And although the hearth, the heart of the apartment, was roaring in full flame, the warmth still wasn't quite enough to keep the young illustrator from shivering so she pulled the covers from her bed and cocooned herself in them, pulling them right up to her ears, sipping the hot tea, burning her tongue slightly but being too absent minded to take notice. Her eyes were transfixed on the raging winds outside the window. The grey sky was being slowly lit up from the horizon line by the early morning sunrise. Life down at the docks in the distance was beginning to spin into action with fishing boats and trade ships leaving the harbour, the bells tolling and men yelling about their business. Though of course she couldn't hear the yelling from that far away.

On her lap, Lopi was splayed out like a furry blanket, warming her up with his belly. His eyes were closed, purring away happily, relaxed as always. Such a carefree life it is to be a cat. To do the cat things.

[Penny Noor]

Suffice to say Penny had not the same pleasure of doing nothing all day. There was no one to brush her when her hair knotted or to feed her. No one to trim her claws or play with her when she was bored. But there was a little furry cat shaped heater to warm her belly when it rumbled. She raised her knees a little, scooping the cat even closer to herself and rested her sketchbook against her limbs. It was such an awkward position to work in but she didn’t mind.

“What do you think, Lopes? Are you gonna be my model today?” she cooed to her pet as her right hand pulled little pots and brushes of black ink and water closer to her.

She wasn’t all that great at painting but her idea for today wasn’t a difficult one. It was more of an experiment. The means of getting to grips with liquid media little better and no longer be so very hindered by her own imagination.

She observed the way his body lay on her lap. A little hour glass that went in at his torso and out at his butt and she traced the same simple shape on her page in only water so that it remained invisible. Holding it up in the morning light she could just about make out where the water glistened. Next she took a quill and dipped it in ink, just a little bit. A little was enough. Then she hovered it very very slowly above the centre of the damp shape, lowering it til it just barely touched the water surface. And when it did all of a sudden the in spread through the water with haste, causing her to recoil her quill and watch as the pigment blossomed. Most of it went right to the edge, outlining the hourglass blob in a fine, jet black line whilst other spots were grey and others still white. A stark contrast separated the shape from where the paper was dry.

Penny smiled to herself, repeating the process til the whole double page spread of her sketchbook was filled with organic shapes in black white and grey. She wasn't one hundred percent satisfied with any of them but she loved how intuitive it was. And when the shapes dried she drew two dots at one end of each and an upside down V between them to read as the cat’s face. Then she’d draw four delicate, elongated shapes in various positions, filling each of them with ink to become the cat’s paws and alas a thicker, coiled shape to become his tail.

Once she was done with that and had an entire page full of little illustrated cats, many of them not quite cat shaped but all fuzzy and soft and quirky, she felt like the page missed something. Of course she wasn’t the type of artist to think that every page of her sketchbook had to be absolutely perfect. She did however want to make the best out of them just incase anyone ever wanted to peek through. But what else could she add?

An idea popped into her head as she once again loaded her quill with ink and with a very delicate and steady hand she pressed it against the now dry illustrations. First she made a line on both sides of one of the cats like a horizon. Then another one above it. Then below she drew round, petal like shape that lined it with dots on the inside of each. Another line of short, vertical strokes. Floral patterns that began with a spiral on the inside and tear drops all around it, wrapped in more lines and dots and shapes. And as she worked away, willing what this space was left on the double page with very simple, busy patterns the morning turned to noon. Sometimes she’d take a paint brush and use the blunt wooden end to dot the paper with ink. Other times she’d double up on more than one line to create thicker ones that then snaked between the cats and end in flat floral shapes. Each cat illustration was surrounded by a tiny tiny slither of white and then such a busy pattern it would make any viewer just dizzy looking at it. She was proud of herself.

[Penny Noor]

Once she was satisfied that she could do no more, Penny turned to the next blank spread and repeated the process. Only this time she would use far less water than before to dampen shapes on the paper. Her tummy rumbled as with the sun at it’s highest point in the sky she had yet to eat breakfast but stills he drew on, paying it no attention. Drawing to her was much like practicing with swords or working out. It had to be done on an empty stomach and approached like it was the only thing in the world that mattered at that particular time. It had to hurt, otherwise how could she learn? Nothing ever comes easy, right?

Some shapes she elongated whilst others she kept in almost a perfect ball. Some of them she painted on with a light wash of diluted grey ink whilst others still invisible clear and hard to see unless she looked in very very close, which she did. This time she’d dot them more than once, letting the ink blossom on the damp paper once more and spread organically in whichever direction it willed to. Sometimes she’d go in with a dry brush and soak up parts of the ink to give the tiny paintings little white splotches whilst other times she’d drop droplets of water on it when it was almost dry to lift and reposition the ink. Every time she watched and noted how it reacted with the water.

She;d try to emulate the speckles she saw on Lopi after all these were illustrations of him as her imagination perceived him. A fuzzy ball of wonderment with legs.

Once that page too was completely filled up with drawings of cats she’d once again go in with a fine tip quill and illustrate patterns around them. This time she’d start of with a leaf motif, sprawling out from the centre, trying to keep it as symmetrical on all sides as she could. In the centre it was quite easy but the farther out towards the corners she went the more the cat paintings got in the way and the more squiffy and uneven the pattern became until any resemblance of symmetry was lost. She still struggled with it massively. In fact large scale symmetry was likely the bane of her life. She hated it and she could not do it right but she wasn’t about to learn without practicing it.

Over the page she’d dedicate a whole hour for drawing the same pattern leaf for leaf this time without the cats to distract her and throw off her eyes. And just like on the page before it turned out quite awful indeed. Nothing she could ever show in a gallery. Uh, how bothersome.

[Penny Noor]

Once the bell chimed 13.00 hours Penny finally couldn't fend off the rumbling in her belly no more. Still holding the book and throwing the cat off her lap she walked over to her heart to grab herself a bowl of last night’s stew. With one hand bringing spoon fulls of food to her mouth and the other still scribbling on the paper, Penny could not keep her eyes off her work.

She had abandoned the pattern work for now, returning to the cat only this time her implement of choice was her trusty pencil that by this point had been so used and abused that it was but a stump with the end of it gnawed off by anxious teeth. She’d focus on Loki's anatomy, something she was by now very used to drawing. She’d record the path of his legs as he walked around the room, drawing without looking at the paper, making very slight movements with her hand as to capture every shape and line his body made. And as he finally sat in front of her, staring at her with those feline eyes she could finally settle on drawing something more substantial over the page.

She draw with the verve of an alvadian dancer, her moves were so quick. Her hand flying across the paper, placing down the first structure lines. She made some scapms first, small thumbnails of the body position of the cat before drawing the final thing. Penny was hunched over the paper like a gargoyle. Every bit of her body now focused in spite of an ache in her spine due to her terrible posture. Her eyes were so close to the paper she could nearly headbutt it. And every so often she would straighten her back once more to look at her drawing from a distance, correct some misplacements and then return to this thoughtful posse.

She’d rub out a little here, draw a few lines where, shade a tiny bit of fur with quick flicks of the wrist…

The end result was something a little different than what her eyes saw but she let her imagination take her. His paws were drawn a little closer together on the page. His tail hung below his line of stance, instead of being curled around him as if he was sitting on some very very thin imaginary line. She too took some creative license with his face, enlarging the eyes and drawing in deeper sockets to give him almost a cartoony, caricatures appearance that would appeal to children rather than fine art seeking adults.

[Penny Noor]

As the evening bells tolled, time came for detail work. And so did Penny sit on her heels and scribe every single line of the cat’s fluffy fluffy fur, one next to another til the whole shape of him was filled in the linear pattern. Once that was done she’d add a few more objects around him, a vase of flowers she imagined with a tall neck and the flowers in it were those she referenced in her sketchbook in pages prior that she came across in the Garden of no Return.She also added shair legs that disappeared un into nothing, giving the piece a little more perspective. And lastly a mouse, although not that well drown, by the cat’s paw. Penny counted on anyone viewing the illustration to be far more distracted by the drawing of the cat than the mouse.

“Satisfactory.” she said to herself.

The next part was the hardest and one she dreaded the most. Oh how she hated colour work….

Sitting herself back down by the window to paint in the setting sunlight that cast an orange hue onto her sketchbook pages, she produced several tubes of paint from her backpack. She emptied a tiny bit of each onto a palette:
-a red
-a yellow
-another yellow, this one a little warmer than the other
-a blue that looked almost black from the tube
- a yellowing brown colour - raw sienna
- a white

And thus she began mixing. She’d have a rag by her side that she tested each colour on before placing it on the paper and as luck would have it the first concoctions were simply awful. Though she had a basic understanding of the colour wheel and how mixing a blue and a yellow made a a green, or howa blue and red made a purple, her colours seemed all wrong. When she mixed the warmer yellow with the blue it looked like baby sick. When she added the lemony yellow to red, the resulting orange was so brown and bright it could almost not be recognised as orange at all. She’d often mix several different colours at once, adding a lot of white only to come out with a grey at the end again and again and again.

Penny bit her lips with frustration. Finally by adding the warmer red to the raw sienna colour and only the tiniest little bit of warm red she came out with a lovely, delicious soft orange hue. And though the pigments didn’t quite mix together perfectly, leaving a few dusty limps in the concoction, she was sick of trying. She watered the paint down so very very much until it was the thinnest, most delicate hint of an orange. And with a shaking hand she mustered the bravery to start painting in her background.

Her wielding of a paint brush was poor as she dragged it across the paper, pushing the pigment of the paint right into it, dulling it unintentionally. In places where she coloured into the lines of the objects she draw she had to wrap a rag around her pencil and try to swipe back as much of it as she could. But it was ok. The paint was so light she could go over it with a darker colour and none would know.

And so she did. She mixed a little ink with blue and red to give it a purple hue and after several tries she even managed to create one that won’t either too red nor too blue. She then proceeded to wash it vertically over the cat’s body. Swipe after swipe she brought the paint lower and lower with a shaking hand, doing it as slowly as she could. Swipe after a swipe.

And suddenly to her horror something tragic happened. The background layer was not yet dry. She hadn’t foreseen her horrific mistake. For the moment the purple grey paint touched it, it bleed into it instantly. The painting was ruined. In anger Penny tore it out and tossed it out the window where the wind caught it and carried it off down the street.

[Madeira Dusk]

Grades Awarded!

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Penny Noor

Skills

• Observation: 2xp
• Painting: 4xp
• Drawing: 4xp
• Animal Husbandry: 1xp
• Endurance: 2xp
• Organization: 2xp

Lores

• Lore of painting with diffusion
• Endurance: ignoring hunger
• Painting: the creative process
• Painting: mixing colours

Awards & Retribution


Notes
That was lovely. This occupies the same mind I'm in, where I have a blanket around my shoulders and a cocoa in my hand. I also love that Penny makes mistakes and experiments. She sounds like a true artist.

And questions/concerns? Feel free to drop me a PM!