Colored Pencil Demonstration - cat on a vintage blue chair

Join the fun!  I'm going to do a colored pencil step by step demonstration of a cat on a vintage chair here on my blog!  Come along for the ride.  I'll be showing how I manipulate professional grade colored pencil into a painterly style.  It's my favorite medium for portraits, and I've done hundreds of them over the years.  I will also be posting on my facebook page: so "like" my facebook page, artistrobinzebley, and you'll get automatic updates!   Questions most welcome!

To start, I needed an idea, and some references.  Since cat allergies in my family prevent me from having a cool kitty creature, I needed someone else's photos to work from.  All photos that I'm using are used with the permission of the photographer for this artwork.

I'm considering all of the kitties on this page today.  Got a preference?

I'm definitely using the chair at the bottom of this post, which I found on Etsy in the vintage shop of GypsyDanceVintage, one of my fellow vintage selling colleagues at Etsy. This chair was still for sale as of the date of this writing. Do check out their shop! 

Kitty will be on the seat of this chair, my decisions now are how much chair, how much kitty, which kitty and which chair angle?  I chose a ginger orange cat because I think the contrast will be interesting.  I also need to decide what the background behind the chair will be.  All opinions welcome!

I am thinking very dark, maybe a barnwood effect but not distressed since the chair is going to be even more distressed when I'm done with it and I like the idea of three textures...fluffy, distressed, and almost smooth.

I'll be pondering those decisions and laying out the basic arrangement in chalk on Mi-Tientes pastel paper.  Let me know what you think!  Robin