Black Cat Zach was inspired by the leaf background.  I loved the orange, yellow and green-veined Elm leaves and made the background first combining them with green Banana leaves, baby lavender Aster flowers and one striped Prayer  Plant leaf in the lower right corner.
 
To continue with my goal of making several cat images for a “Cat Collection”, it was obvious to me that this called for a black cat in order for it to stand out against the powerful textures of the leaves.  The leaves used for Zach’s face consist of brown/black Norway Maple.  You can see the leaf veins which simulate stripes!  The true black around the eyes and under the pink mouth are also Norway Maple darkened (I didn’t have any leaves dark enough) in Photoshop and help to define the nose and chin.  The brown crinkled chest is a piece of aged Hosta leaf to simulate fur.  
 
The whiskers, eyebrows and ear hairs were the most exciting!  I was really stumped as to what to use as in the past I had used brown pine needles but that color just would not work here.  So I went hunting in my saved file of scanned leaves, fingers crossed I could find something.  I DID!   The flower Cleome has these leggy seed pods with stem attached. You can clearly see the pods on the white of the cat’s cheeks.  On the plant, these would be turned around with the pods on the other end of the whiskers.
 
I almost added a mouse where the snail is but I’m quite enamored with my new snail and thought it would be less distracting from Zach cat.  Shell is a curled, dried Banana leaf.  Body is grass.
 
I also added a green moth in the upper right corner made with Rose O’ Sharon wings & body, plus fern antennae.
 
Yellow watercolor background.