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About Me

I'm Paul Cato and I live in Queenstown, New Zealand, with my wife, three daughters, dog and cat. I am a professional artist, painting landscapes - mostly from southern New Zealand - and figures. My work is sought after by people from all over the world.

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Huge Paul Cato Landscape Painting now complete

By paulcato | October 11, 2007

Paul Cato Landscape Gallery

This large painting is now completed. All 46 square feet of it! It will be delivered to some new clients in the U.S. next week. I have absolutely enjoyed the process of working at this large scale and I’ll definitely be keen to do it again. I have some subjects in mind already.

Topics: Painting in Progress | 5 Comments »

Detail of tidal flats

By paulcato | August 23, 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.

Topics: Painting in Progress | 1 Comment »

Left-hand Foreground continued development

By paulcato | August 23, 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.

Topics: Painting in Progress | No Comments »

Left-hand Foreground

By paulcato | August 23, 2007

Topics: Painting in Progress | No Comments »

Right-hand Foreground

By paulcato | August 23, 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 particular view the sun is slightly to the right of the picture so it is almost directly backlit.

Topics: Painting in Progress | No Comments »

Right-hand Mid-Ground

By paulcato | August 23, 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.

Topics: Painting in Progress | No Comments »

Middle distance left and right

By paulcato | August 23, 2007

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

Topics: Painting in Progress | No Comments »

Starting on the foreground

By paulcato | August 23, 2007

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

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Topics: Painting in Progress | No Comments »

Paul Cato is still a living artist!

By paulcato | August 23, 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 the progress of this painting and looking forward to the finished result.

The truth is that I did take a break from actual painting on this project for about three weeks, a month or more back, but I did do some sketching and even some photoshop doodling during that time as I rearranged the foreground concept a number of times and did some work on the perspective and scale of the entire foreground. Since then the painting has been progressing slowly but steadily.

I have deliberately kept the foreground in relatively neutral colours and concentrated on basic values until the entire canvas was covered with paint (not just the washed underpainting). Then just in the past few days I have brought out the warm tints and flicked a few strategic strokes here and there.

Topics: Painting in Progress | No Comments »

Water almost complete

By paulcato | May 26, 2007

Topics: Painting in Progress | 2 Comments »

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