[ How I work - Clockwork Cat]
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This piece was a long time in coming. My idea for this was to continue the mechanical beast theme with something a little more stealthy than the previous pieces. The contrast is much lower in this piece making making it more difficult to discern the animal from it's background. The original concept had the cat sitting, possibly positioned as a house cat, but I changed my mind partly because I wanted the machine outside, and partly because I wanted to keep the landscaped orientation of the previous pieces.

The first thing I did before I began any of the sketches was to check out web sites and anatomy books on cats. I wanted to keep the frame as close as I could to the shape of a thin cat. I used the skeleton image below for some of my reference. I meant to note where I got this, but during the span of the whole project I lost the information.

These are some the thumb nails that I used in the development of the final piece. Many were sketched on note pads during meetings, or while I was on the phone.

Step 2: Final Sketch

This is the point where I finalize a sketch to use as the base for the image. The size varies with the amount of detail. This particular image was quite large. Notice that there isn't any shading in this piece. The point of this is to establish line art, not shading.

Step 3: Blocking in Color

At this stage I like to fill in all the various shapes with their pre-airbrushed base color. This is personally my most disliked of steps, because it requires hours of pen tooling in Photoshop.

Step 4: Airbrush the Blocking

This is my favorite part of the process. I airbrush all of the blocking so that it looks three dimensional. I put in a lot of detail at this point, although I don't include all the detail. I've also placed the whole piece against black.

Step 5: Create the Background

This was a tough decision. I wasn't sure what to use for the background. I gathered a few opinions and, as always, my wife had the best idea. I decided to go with her idea of a field, and decided to make the setting night.

I added some background elements to separate the foreground from the background.
Finally, I added a horizon line to give depth.

Step 6: Add Detail to the Subject

I went back and added more detail to the body of the cat. All of the Japanese is real, and has some meaning that connects it to the animal.

This is a very time consuming step, and requires the most attention to detail. Depending on how large the final image is to viewed, more detail is added. The larger the image, the more detail I want in the piece. This particular example can be printed 13"x19" naturally, with no interpolation.

Step 7: Blending the Background and Subject

This step needs to be done carefully. Matting this incorrectly will leave background elements on top of the subject, ruining the illusion.

Step 8: Blending the Subject into the Background. Finishing the Piece.

Here I darken parts of the subject to blend it into the background.

At this point I went in and adjusted several of the blending modes to achieve a more etherial look.
This is the finished version of the cat. I hope that you enjoyed the look into the process that I used to complete this piece.
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