I made an earlier drawing along these lines that I really liked but its current status is sort of in limbo, and I don't have a photo of it. So I made this one, attempting to recapture the quality of the earlier one. I've really been enjoying the so-called ‘silver’ microns, which allow me to create subtle layers of the hennesque flowers for the background patterning; and of course cats in general and calicos in particular have glorious splotched patterns of a softer type in their fur, ideal for watercolour:)

calico cat doodle, roughly 3 x 5-3/16"; scrap paper, graphite, microns, watercolour, 03nov25; photographed sony a7c, sony 90mm macro, 1/100s, ISO 400, WB: cloudy, ev +0.3; lightened, colour adjusted, cropped and scaled to 4000 pixels (click for higher resolution) in gimp

This is a nice enough drawing, but doesn't capture the ease and spontaneity of the other—sometimes, you just hit something out of the park, more or less by accident, and accepting that experience as ‘only once in a (great) while’ is part of joy and frustration of making art.

This particular piece is made on paper from a credit card envelope—corporations, when they're trying to get you to buy things, often use thicker, textured, or otherwise subtly (or sometimes obviously) better quality paper to deliver a tactile indicator of value. I like making doodles on this stuff, cuz i'm weird that way—now that I'm incorporating these little bits into mixed media journal pages, I have an excuse to doing these minor experiments.

Unless otherwise noted, text, image and objects depicted therein copyright 1996--present sylvus tarn.