Cat with Che Thai

Chè Thái is a Vietnamese dessert drink made with shaved ice, coconut milk, red water chestnuts, fresh fruit and jellies. And why a cat? Well, the Vietnamese zodiac equivalent of the rabbit is the cat so I can embody both of these cute animals at once.

This is my first feline jar so I did something different with the snout where it looks like a small triangle on a larger upside down heart. To further define the facial expression, I also added a tongue sticking out. Although depending on how you look at it, it could be an open mouth or tongue. Whiskers grow out from the snout but it looked strange when I drew it on this way. So I painted the whiskers further out on the edges of the cheeks.

I took advantage of the beige tone of the raw clay to paint less of the surface so I only needed to paint on the spots of the cat’s body. The spots were really fun to paint since I could spontaneously draw blob shapes. I also added my signature heart shaped blob. It would have taken a lot longer if I needed to paint around the spots as well since every design needs to be painted three times without overlap.

For the drink, I painstakingly painted each red, yellow and green topping in different shapes on top of a layer of white underglaze. Since these spots were so small, I decided to overlap paint to save some of my sanity. Luckily the paint didn’t bubble too much or peel after glaze firing.