About Me

I'm Paul Cato and I live in Queenstown, New Zealand, with my family, 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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Painting in Progress

By Paul Cato | May 9, 2007

OK, so here’s the big painting underway. You’ll be able to follow the progression of steps that go into a typical Paul Cato landscape. (Depending on whether I remember to take the pictures – and how long it takes me to process them. I will probably not post them one at a time but I’ll get them up as I can squeeze in the time.)

Initial layout

Click on the image to open a bigger picture.

The sketch is done in charcoal and is easily removed with a duster. I sometimes make quite a few adjustments as I work on refining the composition. Anything and everything can be changed at this stage and I prefer to leave the layout and come back to it from time to time to see if I can find any compositional problems. In this case I made several adjustments to scale and proportions over a few days.

Sketch

I firmed up the lines with light pencil and then dusted off the charcoal. Then painted a thin wash of colour to give me the first 3D form. Some other reasons too, but why should I tell all my secrets? And why those colours? Not telling that either! Actually I could have used just about any colour for this as long as it is not too dark. Sometimes on a smaller painting I get excited with the sketch and forget to do this step completely. It is not vital, but is often helpful.

Washed Underpainting

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