If you have seen Heather's cat paintings, for example on Shadowness, you may wonder why I feel the need at all to change something. Believe me, I try to stay as close to her paintings because that's just the way I feel about it. Unfortunately the beads don't always agree, though.
I never tire to say that Heather knows about these changes. I am not just running wild with her creations.
Let's take a look at the Tinycat in a Box for example.
When Heather started the Tinycat series, this is what she wrote "I got a little book of watercolour card, it has 15 pages and I'm going to fill it with tiny cats".
A cuff is not tiny. It's long, and more often than not long into the wrong direction. It wouldn't have made sense to turn the cat and its box around, though. So I dragged the design out a bit by making the window bigger and moving it over. I also cut off part of the floor and added the box corner as an extension instead.
This is the Silhouette Cat. As you see at first glance, I cut it on both sides, I left out the dark circles and took one circle off the moon. Instead I added the dangling tail. Why?
I felt that a pendant with this image would be great, but not everyone likes big pendants. To do Heather's cats justice, I need a certain space to put them on. The more complicated the painting, the bigger the piece will have to be to transfer it into a "bead painting". If I can cut something off to make the rest of that "bead painting" look better, so be it ... although it sometimes hurts a bit to do so.
The good thing is, though, I'll always be able to make another variation, like an SLN or a cuff maybe!
Now why the tail? Ok, I admit it, I love to make extensions, they are that little extra. As a crazy cat lady, how could I leave the tail out here? ;-)
Changing a tabby into a tortie?? Now that's taking it a bit too far, isn't it? You have no idea how I have struggled to make this a wearable pendant with the tabby on it, but the details were just too much. Maybe you already noticed that I usually (not always) leave out the black outlines. They simply take up precious bead space. Now imagine this tabby without those outlines and keep in mind that beads don't make fine lines very well (remember the whiskers post). No matter how hard I tried, it looked like a two color blob with two small black blobs, so that's why I finally went for the tortie (or calico) look.
I want to try to even go farther with this kind of change, but that's for a different post.
The last one I want to talk about is my favorite so far, the Dark Cat.
Working with all these colors was just wow. I really wanted to keep as much of them as possible, but I still had to cut a bit off the sides. Again there are no black outlines, but I kept enough of the black to keep the idea.
In fact at first I thought - no, Heather and I thought - this design would look much wilder transferred into beads, and I guess we were both glad it was not!
Oh, and why is Grouchycat's annoying bird in my pendant yellow instead of purple? Very easy, the yellow made for better contrast!
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