Well the excitement of black cat awareness day is over and there were some amazing photos posted on cats protections facebook page! It really has inspired me to look for some more black cat models and do some more paintings.

Cats protection selected a gallery of their favourite photos, you can see them here. And I chose one of those 10 pictures to win the prize painting, Molly by Stephanie Stanesby.

During Black Cat Awareness Day, on October the 27th, Cats Protection are asking cat lovers to share photos of their black cats on their flickr site, facebook page or their flickr page or tweet mentioning @CatsProtection and #CPBlackCats . They will select some of their favourite photos and create a gallery of them.

The Prize

I am going to select a winner from the gallery and paint a 10×8 inch portrait of the winning cat! :-)

So if you fancy a portrait of your beautiful black puss upload your photo to http://www.facebook.com/catsprotection and tell people how wonderful our black cats are and maybe you could win a painting of your cat.

Why Black Cats?

Black Cat Awareness Day from Cats Protection aims to help around 1,300 unwanted black cats who are being overlooked by potential owners. Black cats make up one fifth of the total number of cats being looked after by Cats Protection, and each black cat is waiting a week longer to find a home compared to the average cat.

To adopt a black cat, please log on to www.cats.org.uk for details of your local Cats Protection branch or centre.

To see some of my paintings of black cats including my rescue boy Harry take a look at the Fascinating Felines Gallery.

We have a lovely local market and one of our favourite stalls is Nick’s cakes. Hmmmmmmm yum! He makes some really wonderful cakes! My favourite  is a parsnip, pecan and maple cake.

It’s a busy time at the moment, what with commissions for Christmas and printing the calendars and Christmas cards so I was very much looking forward to my cake and a large cup of tea. But when I got to the kitchen what did I find? the box was on the kitchen floor and my cake was GONE! Nothing left but CRUMBS!!!! Chi had EATEN MY CAKE!

Oh boy! He’s always been a notorious thief and has even modelled for me for one of the Christmas cards – The Turkey Thief obviously :-). But this is taking it to a whole new level!!!! My favourite cake!
Sigh!

So now I have to put my cakes in a tin so he can’t open it. Sometimes I wonder why I live with cats! ;-)

This is the guilty party in Turkey Thief.

Of course this isn’t the end of the whole sorry affair. An hour or so later I was cleaning up the landing after the inevitable happened and the cake made a fast exit from the cat. Obviously parsnip disagrees with him!

I designed a bag for myself a couple of years ago and I loved it. Its a leather bag with the painting Golden Eyes on both sides. It’s a good size, big enough to carry magazines or a small laptop and it’s great for visits to Waitrose too. I use mine all the time and I find it a good talking point! I’ve met lots of nice people when they stop me to ask about my bag. I always end up talking about cats and dogs in the supermarket aisle. :-)
People have asked me if I can design a bag for them, and as I fancy another bag for myself I’ve agreed to create some more.

Here are two of them.

My second notebook has arrived! I’ve taken some photos and put them in an album on flickr. It looks as good as The Bengal Notebook.

This notebook is pure Siamese, there are 17paintings and sketches of beautiful Siamese cats with plenty of space for notes and drawings on both ruled and plain pages. Here are a couple of the pages….

You can see more photos on flickr in The Siamese Notebook album.

Or you can look through the preview below and buy it on blurb.

The Siamese Notebook by Denise Laurent