Todays painting is a tortoiseshell cat rolling on the floor. Torties have such pretty coats, so full of colour and great for a painter. She is perfect for thick, juice strokes of oil paint!

Tortie Upsidedown
10×8 oil on board

New this year is The Painted Cat 2011 Wall Calendar! Now you can get your feline fix all through the year with 12 different cats to add colour and feline fun to each month. The calendar is A4, 8 x 11 inches in size. There are 12 pages, 1 page per month, each featuring one of my cat paintings, as well as a cover and a back. It’s wire bound so it’s easy to hang on the wall and change the pages.

The paintings included are Hot Spot, Sugar Plum Fairies, Java, Mother’s Day, In The Pink, The Fishpond, Alice, Sunbathing, Doing The Washing Up, Favourite Toy, Lunchtime and The Carol Singers.

You can see all the pages in more detail, just visit me on flickr and have a look at the calendar’s flickr album.

Buy a 2011 Wall Calendar in The Painted Cat shop. Both UK and USA versions are available.

Beautiful Tinky sits in her favourite spot in the garden, dreaming mice dreams among the flowers. I bet that rock gets wonderfully warm in the sun. Cats always find the best places to sleep don’t they?

I love her expression of contentment too.

I love the colours in this painting, there were so many colours in her fur and in the rock beneath her. I built it up in many layers and kept the paint thick and juicy in the coat and in the rock.

This is a 20 x 16 inch acrylic painting on stretched canvas.

This is Chloe. She’s laying on the step enjoying a hot summers day and the feel of the heat in her fur. The sun lights up her beautiful coat and fills it with rich reds and gold’s that set off her tortoiseshell markings so well.

She’s painted in acrylics on Fabriano Pittura paper. 

The first coat was a coat of iridescent gold medium and that shows through the subsequent layers of paint making her fur glow with the gold of the sun. This only shows from certain angles and is quite subtle but the photo gives an idea of how it looks.

A portrait of Geezer by the pond. This was a commissioned painting for his owners Fiona and Mark. Geezer was an amazing and very rare male silver tortie Maine Coon. I love the way he lets his tail float in the pond.