This painting was created in honor of my very first cat, Fuzzy. It was created with acrylic paints on an 11×14 inch canvas, and completed December 13, 2025. It features a natural color scheme with a vibrant teal background that has a slight gradient and bold brushstrokes for texture.

My reference photos for Fuzzy were very limited. Although I have taken many photos of her over the course of her lifetime, most of them were terrible as far as art references. Most of the photos I had of her were taken from very far away, and were blurry or dark, or her had was not facing the camera. Out of all the pictures I had, only four showed her face straight on, and none of those were any good. One was very dark, being backlit from a window behind her. One was heavily washed out due to a too-bright flash. A third was a scan of a photograph taken with a disposable film camera, and was very blurry. And a fourth was taken from a considerable distance and the lighting was terrible. So I did not have much good reference material, but I managed to extract enough details of her colors and markings to create the portrait. This is the sad reality for many pet portrait artists and what they have t work with from their own customers. Most of the photos we take of our pets are just silly little quick snapshots, without regard to proper lighting, composition, camera settings, and focus. Although these snapshots make great memories of our pets, they are not great to use as references for paintings, since so much information about the pet’s fur details and colors is lost due to poor lighting and blurry photos. Which is why I always ask for multiple photos, because sometimes it can be enough to get a better picture of the pet’s actual appearance that way.

Fuzzy was the first cat I ever had. We adopted her in 1988, when I was about 7 years old. She was found in a cardboard box with some other kittens at the brick factory where my father worked. The other kittens all were adopted but Fuzzy was left behind, and my father brought her home. She was very young, maybe 6 weeks old at the time, and quickly became my best friend. I carried her around with me everywhere, dressed her up in doll clothes, showed her how to open doors and closets, and wrestled with her, and she not only tolerated me but seemed to enjoy the attention. She followed me around and slept with me in my bed often. But she was my father’s cat, first and foremost, and was more bonded with him than anyone else in the family. She was the matriarch in the family, welcoming all later feline additions to our family with a hiss and swat, but later curling up with them to nap and playing with them. She was blessed with a copious amount of tortitude, living up to her breed’s reputation. We were fortunate that she lived a very long and healthy twenty years with us, and I am sure that tortie attitude was what fueled her for so long.