About Me

I'm Paul Cato and I live in Queenstown, New Zealand, with my wife, two of my three daughters, two fluffy dogs and a very overweight cat. I am a professional artist, specializing in painting large landscape vistas - mostly from southern New Zealand, but also from all around the globe. I also love to paint enchanting figure paintings, often using my beautiful wife and daughters as models.

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Archive for August, 2007

Detail of tidal flats

Thursday, August 23rd, 2007

I did some research to find out exactly what this bird is – but I have forgotten again. I think it is a type of heron but I’m really not too worried. It is strategically placed to help set the scale of the grasses.

Left-hand Foreground continued development

Thursday, August 23rd, 2007

The sun is brought out a bit more with the addition of some warmer highlights and cooler shadow tones. The foreground bushes get some work, including some ‘shiny’ leaves.

Left-hand Foreground

Thursday, August 23rd, 2007

Right-hand Foreground

Thursday, August 23rd, 2007

Moving forward a lot of emphasis now includes the accurate placing of shadows and highlights. The establishment of the sun’s position in the landscape’s sky is an important part of creating the illusion of three dimensions. With a painting this large various parts of the painting show shadows and highlights in different positions. In this [...]

Right-hand Mid-Ground

Thursday, August 23rd, 2007

Some more detail is painted in: rocks and driftwood get blocked in. Scale and perspective are more important than form at this stage because everything forward of the mountains must work convincingly to make the flat canvas look like it is 3D and the water lying flat.

Middle distance left and right

Thursday, August 23rd, 2007

The initial background tree colour was applied with a filbert brush.

Starting on the foreground

Thursday, August 23rd, 2007

I blocked in a thin under-coat of a neutral-to-warm brown to most of the foreground of the painting .

Paul Cato is still a living artist!

Thursday, August 23rd, 2007

My apologies to all those who have wondered if I had disappeared or died whilst working on this big painting. I have had several emails and even phone-calls from people who are wondering what’s happening and asking when I am going to update the website. It seems that there are a lot of people watching [...]