Sharp Dressed Cat

Hi Friends!

Happy Sunday!  Hope your weekend is going well.  It is still cold here and I am not enjoying it.  I am also resisting wearing any official winter clothes as that would be just too depressing to have to do that in October!  So hot water bottles, heated throws and of course, the stove is lit. All I can think about is carbs though!  LOL

Today’s Art . . .

Today’s art is a journal page Neet’s theme this month on Art Journal Journey – In Gear. 

Looking at this page is giving me a weird optical illusion – it’s starting to look like it’s 3D – or is it just me?  The subject of this page is actually 3D, here it is below.  It sits on a shelf in my art room.  I featured it in Second on the Second this month, but the original post was back in 2020, when a friend started a Steampunk Challenge blog, and launched it with a big blog hop and lots of sponsors.  This was my DT piece for the blog hop launch.  I even managed to get us a mention in The Steampunk Explorer online magazine, and then the blog went on a break and never came back.  🙁  The other very well known Steampunk blog was of course Sandee and Amelie’s which also closed down and moved to Facebook a few years ago.  I used to enter that one too but stopped when it moved to FB.  Facebook has ruined the internet!

Anyway, this piece has been on my mind because of the “In Gear” challenge and also because it sits on a shelf just above my table, so I wanted to somehow incorporate it into a journal page.  I thought I would print off some photos and then use them on my page.  I did that last night but unfortunately it seems my printer is on the fritz and it’s not printing as well as it usually does.  After a lot of messing about, this was the best I could get.  As you can see it’s very faded compared to the real thing.

I picked one of the bigger images and glued it down on the page and then covered the rest of the page with collage.  I also found some cogs and gears collage paper to use!

Once everything was dry I ended up painting a glaze over the top of everything but the cat, to harmonise the background a bit more.  I had to draw on his cravat and hat as they were cut off of the image I used, so I did that with some Poscas.  I also gave him a nose, mouth and whiskers and did some extra shading and colour on his face with acrylic inks. I wrote Sharp Dressed Cat on the left side with a white pen but it’s not showing up very well in the photo below.  I might have to work on that some more.  Sharp Dressed Cat is wearing his top hat, his googles and his fancy cravat and pin.

Finally, I added the leftover cogs and gears etc from Friday’s page and grunged them up a bit with some acrylic ink to make them darker and less shiny and new looking.  Plus they were three different metallics, gold, silver and champagne, so now they are all very similar in colour.

But wait, no Miss Lily today?  Yes she was there in the room but I had been trying to tidy up and had just emptied an IKEA Drona box so I’m afraid I lost her to the excitement of being in the empty box.  She had three Drona boxes to play with and was jumping from one to the other.  I made it better by throwing Dreamies treats into the boxes for her to retrieve.

Let me know what you think in the comments.   As always, thanks for reading and Happy Journalling!

Challenges

Art Journal Journey – In Gear

Creative Artiste – Challenge #98 – enlarged photo printed on A4, metallic card, tissue papers for collage x 3, acrylic ink, Poscas,