Shiner - value study

I painted this one almost entirely upside down except for the final touches. I started with only 5 values (1, 3, 5, 7 and 9, 9 being the lightest) (I should have taken a picture at this point :(
The background (reflection in the window) was competing too much with the subject itself (the cat) .  So I changed the the background using the values 8, 7 and 6. (No picture of that step either.) Then  the foreground: the bed (or what looks like a chair) and the cat were too much the same and too dark. So to separate the two I decreased the bed value to the lowest (value 1 and) and used values 3, 4 and 5 for the cat shadow and values 5, 8, 9 on his light side.

Anyway that may be too much information... I could have played with this one a lot longer, but I'm happy with it.

Shiner - value study