A New Painting - the Egyptian Cat (oils on board)

I have always loved cats (I actually have a cat website http://www.cat-breeds-info.com), and decided to paint one. And of course the thought came up how to combine a cat with Egypt. Well, the first thing that came to my mind was the Gayer-Anderson cat - perhaps the most famous Egyptian cat statue, which is a permanent favorite of people visiting the British Museum.

Then I began to wonder what a live cat would look next to the statue, and decided to paint this. I have Abys myself, but this is not my own cat. Oleg Alexeev of the Abysphere cattery in Russia kindly gave me reference photos of this beautiful cat (Abysphere Runet Blogger). I did a drawing using three of his photos.

Here is the working sketch.

And then the first stage. I am inventing painting methods again as I go along... Trying to figure out how to make the Aby's agouti / ticking look reasonably "true". Each hair of the Aby has four bands of color - the lightest nearest the skin, then a darker band, then a lighter one, and the darkest is at the tip. The effect is like that of a brown hare. Could not find any artist advice about this, so I spent days thinking about how to do this, and today started according to plan. The effect is not ready yet, but here is the start.