My new Maine Coon cat greetings card

One of the most popular cards I sell is of my cat Sherry in a flower garden.  Several people have suggested I did a card with one of my current cats on it....so I have!  I have done my beautiful boy Tequila in a similar sort of setting.

Here it is...

Incase you are not familiar with the other card have a look at this blog post  and you will see the card that inspired my new one.

My new card was also inspired by an ACEO card I sold recently. Have a look at this blog post to see the paintings I did of Tequila, in the miniature size of ACEO which is 2 and a half by 3 and a half inches! I sell these on eBay where there is a good market for them.

This is a few of the the Photoshop mock ups ( or mash ups! ) that I used as a guideline for this painting. You can see how I change things around, as I plan my idea.

I planned this card using Photoshop.  I put the ACEO painting on to a new A4 sized sheet. I then looked around some of my flower photos and found a few I liked the look of.

I then cropped the flower photos, very roughly, and layered them up on to the cat picture. I moved everything around and resized it all several times.  I cut bits out and overlaid things about 10 times until I got a composition that I liked. It is not neat and tidy ( infact it is rather messy!! )and is just done as a quick way of putting my ideas together. I have done so much Photoshop that I can do it really quickly, whereas pencil sketching of ideas, takes me ages..and I don't have the instant impact of colours and details.

I then drew out the outline I wanted,  on to a piece of card and started painting. This is the fun bit!!

If you look at the finished card you can see there are lots of changes I made at the painting stage. I put grass behind all the plants, and a few clouds in the sky. I removed quite a few flowers as they made it too cluttered. I also had to do the rest of Tequila to fill the space at the bottom behind the flowers! I made him just slightly bigger in proportion to the flowers as well.

I shall send this off to the printers tonight. I always do my cards in batches, 4 at a time. I have 4 ready to go now. This will be available on my website  roz-artz in the next week or so. I have been so busy I have not updated my site for weeks. I have quite a lot of new stuff to put on it.

I shall do some "cats in garden"cards of my other 3 cats soon. It would be good to have a set of them.