ARTIST: Shadowmyst Art, Sharon O’Shea Wood
MEDIUM: Digital Painting
TOOLS: Procreate, iPad Pro 13 in, Apple Pencil Pro
ORIENTATION: Portrait
CREATED: 2025
STATUS: Personal Collection
DIMENSIONS: 8 x 10 in
Lady Faith Greyfur — Faith — is a dark silver-grey domestic short-hair cat with striking yellow-green eyes that seem to see straight through you. She was rescued as a kitten from the middle of the Tappan Zee Bridge and eventually found her way to a local Petco, where my husband and I adopted her at four months old. Cautious by nature, Faith takes time to extend her trust — but once given, it is absolute. She found her person in our Maine Coon, Mickey; wherever he goes, Faith follows. She turned 14 in December 2025, and those watchful eyes have lost none of their intensity. This portrait was painted to capture exactly that — the quiet, unwavering gaze of a cat who has learned that home is worth holding onto.
Resource photos taken from my personal photography collection.
Artist’s Process:
This portrait was created entirely in Procreate on a 13″ iPad Pro M5 with Apple Pencil Pro. Faith presented a particular compositional challenge — a dark-coated subject against a deliberately soft, neutral background, with the full weight of the painting carried by her eyes and expression. The close crop was a deliberate choice, eliminating distraction and placing the viewer in direct, unavoidable contact with her gaze. Layers of cool grey and near-black brushwork build the fur’s depth and directional texture, while the yellow-green irises required careful color mixing to achieve their distinctive chartreuse luminosity against the surrounding darkness. The soft mauve drapery background was rendered in loose, flowing strokes to contrast with the precision of the facial detail — drawing the eye inward toward Faith and keeping it there.
Challenge:
Painting a dark-coated animal against a muted background presents one of portraiture’s most demanding technical problems: how do you convey form, texture, and life in a subject that absorbs rather than reflects light?
Faith’s charcoal-grey coat required building depth through layered undertones — cool blues and warm browns beneath the surface darks — so that her fur reads as three-dimensional and textured rather than as a flat silhouette. Defining her facial structure, particularly the transition from cheek to ear, meant working with the subtlest shifts in value where most artists would reach for contrast that simply isn’t there in the reference.
Her eyes presented the opposite challenge: two luminous focal points that had to feel genuinely alive without overpowering the quiet, watchful mood the portrait required.