New Painting: "Manekineko – The Beckoning Cat"

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Here is a new painting I did over the weekend. This is Manekineko, the beckoning cat that you often see in various Asian stores.

Here are a few of the Japanese symbols in the painting. Big kudos to Aya for being my art director on this. πŸ™‚

  • When the cat is holding up the left paw, it is beckoning people to come in.
  • When the cat is holding up the right paw, it is beckoning money. I’ve noticed that most of the cats I see are holding up their right paw. Hmm…
  • Both paws beckons both money and people. I love it when ancient symbolism works out so logically.
  • Red is a lucky color
  • Calico cats are lucky.
  • Turtles and cranes together are lucky
  • The hammer is a traditional festival hammer.
  • The cushion is a traditional square Japanese sitting cushion.

I painted this one primarily in Painter and Photoshop at 16″ x 20″ at 300 DPI. It should make a nice print.

take care
Danc.

9 Comments

  1. Cute. Reminds me of \”Neko no ongaeshi\”–The Cat Returns; very Miyazaki styled film. -Seji

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  2. Anonymous says

    Cute! I search for manekinekos at A9 all the time. Then I get my discount at amazon plus frustate them by constantly searching for something they don\’t sell.

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  3. I was trying to tell Danc about that movie (The Cat Returns) last weekend… I find it interesting that he\’s been to studio ghibli, but I\’ve seen a movie he hasn\’t. Very cool, Danc, you did a nice job. I wish I could post my latest, sketch, I did a character sketch last night, one I\’ve been working on perfecting, but don\’t really know where to put images, so they\’ll stay… –Ray Ps. My gmail account is rgbingham… in case you wanted to linkie me… πŸ™‚

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  4. Here\’s a link to my latest sketch… did last night… ballpoint pen, of course, so it looks craptacular… Did it for the school\’s Artwalk night, in front of a hundred elementary school kids/parents as I volunteered this year to be a school Art Docent for a couple classes… πŸ™‚ –Ray

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  5. I used to collect \”lucky cats,\” but when I moved to NYC there were far too many around, which broke me of the habit. Will the prints be available for purchase?

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