Illustration Friday: "Round"

Hoopin'

This guy is my debut into "inking" digitally.  It kind of cracks me up to call it inking since there is no actual ink involved!  It did feel more like pen inking than I thought it would though.  And it was fun to play around with Photoshop CS5 with all its options for customizing brushes.  I colored the illustration with a brush I made myself from a sample of a traditional ink drawing.  A little art irony perhaps!  Just as a side note, I use an Intuos tablet, and an old one at that.  Still works great though.

Something occurred to me as I was coloring this.  As I'm "painting" (of course, without actual paint) and discovering how textures work in Photoshop, I'm thinking that visual interest generated by Photoshop could probably cover up for a lot of bad drawing!  I'm going to have to be mindful of that as I practice.  

Illustration Friday: "Vanity"

Mother's Vanity

And...more bunnies

What always happens to me is that I'll get an idea for an illustration, do a sketch I like, and then not be able to decide how I really want to finish it. After finishing the Illustration Friday "silent" bunny from this week I still wanted to try it a couple of different ways.  Here they are:

The first one was drawn with brush pen on paper from an old Arches watercolor block.  The paper has a lot of texture to it and the brush pen really picked that up.  I think I like this one better than the one I posted for Illustration Friday!

The black and white version was drawn on watercolor paper too because I was planning to color it.  I have a thing for black and white art though, so the color never happened.  The paper is smoother than the other one, Canson Aquarelle, and I used both the brush pen and my crow quill and ink.

Funny isn't it, how different styles of finishing a sketch can have such an effect of the feel of it?  I haven't decided if I'm done with this yet.  If I try anything else I'll post it here!

Illustration Friday: "Silent"

This week's topic made me remember the sweet, silent baby bunnies we had in our yard at the end of this summer.  They were so still that I had to put leaves and sticks next to them so I could hope to find them again in the grass!  I drew this little interpretation with pen and ink and colored it with watercolor.  My watercolor skills are a little rusty but I'll keep working on them!  The posts with bunny photos are here and here.

Added 11/17/2011:  two new versions of the bunny!  Check them out here.

Illustration Friday: "Stripes"

Admiring the view on the beach, 1900

Watercolor block sketchy doodles

Last night I used an old watercolor block page as a sketchbook.  I had just opened a little watercolor set ( Cotman Sketchers' Pocket Box by Winsor & Newton) and I really wanted to play around with the cute little blocks of watercolor.  I was sketching mostly with ballpoint pen so I couldn't correct anything.  Then I touched up some of the drawings with pen and ink after the watercolor dried.

You can see the little boy's head from the top picture in the bottom corner of the bottom one.  I cleaned the top sketch up to post alone because it was my favorite.  No judging the bad proportions!  Pen sketching means you just kind of....go with the flow!