Cat Cat Cat

Despite my recent color debacle, I decided to make a series of black and white prints on top of variegated color backgrounds. I have always loved Japanese prints made that way so thought that I would try my hand at it. For the black and white over print I chose at whimsical lino-cut of a cat with a birthday cake that I made in honor of a friend’s birthday (I put white gesso over top of an unused Christmas card, printed the cat on top and sent it on). Black on red, black on blue, black on violet. Cat, cat and cat.

My friend had earlier made a lino cut of a cat with a long tail and had trouble getting a clean edge on said tail. Both her husband and I commented to her that perhaps the tail could use some more work. Later, I recalled that I used to give my students advice on how to complete assignments and found that sometimes if I tried to follow my own advice I would discover just how hard the assignment was. So I did the same thing with this cat lino cut. Sure enough, I had to cut the edge on the tail over and over again to try to get the curve right. And to make matters worse, the accidentally shaved part of the cat’s nose off. I ended up cheating a bit and adding wood putty to the nose and added paint to the tail to round it out.