Emma, a beautiful Bengal cat, is staring at her reflection in the door plate. Her expression is so intense, I wonder what she sees?

I painted her in acrylics on paper and I thought she deserved rich luscious colour too. You can see my original model here on flickr.

Here’s a close up of the painting and her wonderful intense eyes.

This is Nala, a bengal cat with a deep and abiding passion for water. Bengal owners around the world will recognise the symptoms, an obsession with sinks, taps and baths and an uncanny ability to turn on taps! I can certainly sympathise, it seems that every 10 minutes our snow bengal Ming is in the sink busily trying to turn on the tap and help himself. This is despite the expensive cat fountains we have all around the house especially for water loving cats! But ff course it’s much more fun to help yourself.

Nala spends a lot of her time in the sink and she makes such a pretty picture looking up with her big gold eyes and surrounded by the reflections in the steel.

Nala in the sink is painted in acrylics on watercolour paper. Click the image to see a close up detail of the painting.

This Bengal kitten is called Kirby and he lives in the USA with his owners Terri and Rich and his feline friends Kiyah and Priss. Those huge ears and that cool Bengal expression made me want to paint him. He’s not quite finished yet, he still needs his whiskers added.

And here he is with his whiskers and other details finished. This is a watercolour and acrylic painting on watercolour paper.

Click the image to see a close up detail.

This is a large acrylic commissioned painting of Ozzy, a Snow Bengal. He’s standing in a field of bluebells and forget-me-nots.

The canvas is pinned to a large board and the first underpainting is done. Then I start on building Ozzy’s form.

As Ozzy takes shape I move over to the background and start on the layers of colour that make up the bluebells and forget-me-nots. I want to keep the background very loose and soft. Then back to Ozzy for the final development. It’s nearly finished.

Here’s the finished painting stretched over 20 x16 stretcher bars and varnished. Click the image to see a close up of the canvas.

This painting is my pretty blue eyed snow Bengal Cassie as a young feline tyrant. Even as a kitten she KNEW without any doubt that she was in charge. It was never in question, never up for discussion. As soon as she arrived all the other cats acknowledged her as top cat without even a glimmer of protest and so, of course, did the humans. I think you can see that in her eyes, that confidence, and that’s what I want to capture in this painting.

Here’s the sketch for the painting.

The first layers of paint on paper. The paper is Bockingford watercolour paper with a couple of coats of an acrylic gesso which adds a nice texture under the paint. The finished painting will be about 14 x 10 inches I should think.

She is laying in a pool of sunshine on a green floor and her fur is full of warm tones while her eyes are a mix of cerulean blue with flashes of green and purple. Most of the underpainting is done now and I need to work on fine details and highlights and shadows.

A close up of her ear showing the texture of the paper and the way the paint sits in the texture, making interesting, subtle patterns and tones.

A close up of her eye. You can just about see in the photo that her eyes have several colours in them. There’s the luscious cerulean blue that gives Cassie her startling eye colour but when you look close, you’ll see there are turquoise greens in the highlights and purples in the shadows too.

The finished picture.