This beautiful kitty memorial meant a lot to me and the collector. They gave me full trust to select position and background of the painting. One of the reference photos had a strong mustard yellow throw blanket, which I loved against Tamas coloring, but the pose was off.  I also foud out the collector was renovating their house, and tiling their kitchen with custom Talavera tiles. 

I devised  7x9-inch maquette blanket and created a pattern and colors I thought spoke well to the Mexican heritage paintings, and did my best to paint this scene "from life" using the reference images available