Posh Paper Mache Pussycats

Here's some pussycat inspiration for you! I am most definitely a cat person - having had a cat in the household from a young age they are simply an integral part of life. The only period of life I have been without a cat cohabiting with me was when I was away at University and my plan is to become a mad cat lady in old age!

The cats in my life have been, (as a small child) - "Cinders", her fur as black as the night, as her name suggests, and being a Hallow'een baby, she was supposedly my witches familiar. She was fittingly grumpy because she was confined to living in a glorified porch with access to outdoors and would occasionally give you a scratch if you didn't have your wits about you. Following that, in my teenage years, there was Oscar, a primarily white cat, who I think my parents adopted from a neighbour and who had a lovely temperament but poor personal hygiene. Additionally, his whiteness showed the dirt more easily, so he was required to live outside most of the time which made the poor boy susceptible to sunburn on his pink ears. My parents weren’t keen on animals living inside the house, but to my mind that’s more than a little mean.

After university, my now husband and I adopted two young cats from a rescue centre who became "Big Cat" and "Little Cat", as in "where's the big cat?" and "have you seen the little cat?"... All black Little Cat was a sweet little thing and black and white Big Cat was loyal, like a dog, but not the sharpest tool in the box. I’m not sure if they understood why they had been rescued together as they had nothing in common. Today we have three felines living with us - Jack Meower (named after Keifer Sutherlands character in the TV Show 24 because I love all things Sutherland) a lithe tuxedo cat and a perfect gentleman, who even our vet admires and his half sister Squeaky, a sweet slightly anxious yet wilful and contrary tortoiseshell who likes her food and has over time become known as "the brown one". Then there is Florence, who we adopted latterly from a friend who needed to rehome her, and who is an attractive brown and white tabby with black eyeliner, destroyer of worlds and general troublemaker who offers endless entertainment with her clever plotting and wild antics!

Clockwise from top right: Jack Meower, The Brown One, Florence, Big Cat, Little Cat and Oscar, plus a gratuitously cute picture of Jack and The Brown One as Kittens (no good photographs of Cinders survive).

Seven cats is clearly not enough cats to know in one lifetime so my ambition is to collect a few more given time! In the meantime, I can create some that don't need feeding using posh paper mache to tide me over.

Cats are so bendy and flexible and throw more shapes than a Vogueing Madonna so I think they make a challenging yet fascinating subject for art whilst simultaneously being very difficult to capture. I make my life slightly easier in this respect by having a stylised approach to my creations so that they have simplified forms, but I have still experimented with various ways of rendering a suitable cat body shape and I'm not sure I have yet arrived at a final form that I am satisfied with.

Some attempts at cat body shapes in posh paper mache.

The blue cat above was an early, and not bad attempt at a sitting cat followed by the black and white one next to it which was a little more stylised, but became too simplified for my liking. I decided that a standing cat was a better option and was quite pleased with the chubby tabby cat on the left (who's body shape was inspired by "the brown one"), but this was quite a complicated build and I needed to make the design easier and faster to make to enable me to supply them to my shops and galleries for sale, so this ended up being a one-off.

For now, I have arrived at the feline body configuration on the right as a good representation of a cat and a reasonably easy shape to construct with a cut out wooden tail to make construction quicker. I'm still on the lookout for better solutions to improve my cat body shape so keep an eye out to see if things change again.

Watch this video for a closer look and more inspiration!