Painted Rocks: My Process for Creating Butterfly Kitty Cats

My creative juices started flowing the other day when I spied several flat, oddly-shaped stones in my rock pile.

The shapes and natural colors of these stones seemed ideal for painting half of a cat's face. The goal was to keep it simple with one eye-catching feature - the cat's eyes!


First, I traced the stone shape on a piece of paper and sketched my idea to see if it would work.

The initial design sketch

I was pleased with the effect and started painting my kitties with these two simple features:

• A pinkish nose
• White whiskers highlighted with gray

Because I was leaving most of the stone unpainted, I wanted my focal point to be each cat's eye.  I chose yellow, green and blue eye colors and added more detail to this specific facial feature for each kitty cat stone.

The eyes are the focal point on these painted stones

I liked the result and when I placed the two larger stones next to each other, I had an "Aha moment." Why not create a complete cat's face? I used my graphic viewer and flipped a 2nd image of the painted stone to complete each face. The kitty cat became symmetrical on both sides like a butterfly.

As you can see below, some stones worked better than others when creating a complete face.

Butterfly Stone Kitty Cats

It was a fun surprise to see each kitty's face after the original and flipped image were combined.

Ideas

• Find stones that closely match in shape and size and paint left and right sides of the face. Then mix and match for funny kitty faces
• Glue a half-face stony kitty to a stick and use for a bookmark or plant accessory
• Instead of leaving the stone's natural color, paint the rock black, white, calico, etc. before adding the nose, whiskers and eyes.
• Place a half-face kitty stone strategically in a garden so it looks like a cat is hiding among the greenery.
• Use this technique with other critters also - e.g., owls, dogs, bunnies. 

 A PURRfect solution for oddly-shaped stones!

© Cindy Thomas Painted Rocks