Painting a cat

I nabbed these lovely pictures of cats from Todd Klein's blog. It's a regular visit for me because of his fascinating logo design discussions, tho he covers quite a few topics.

Anyways I felt the cat pics were ripe for some digital paint practice I've been meaning to get to in Art Rage. In addition to it's nifty brush tools, Art Rage has a cool interface for posting reference on your canvas. Trying to paint like paint, the process was to first build up shapes, then lay in some solids, move onto highlights, and finally get into some of the details. The cats have a nice patterning to them that I only touch on, tho the exercise for me was more of a foundation rather than a portrait.