Illustration Friday: "Peace"

This piece is graphite on Bristol and in a slightly different style than I usually use.  But I loved drawing this.  Working on the details and shading while listening to my current music favorites was very relaxing!

Custom Plates for Preakness 138

Hi everyone!  I'm sorry I haven't posted for a while but I was working on this year's souvenir plates for Preakness 138.  They are gifts for the owners whose horses are entered in the race and they aren't supposed to see the plates until the day they receive them.  But I can post now so here's a selection from the group of nine.  Orb won the Kentucky Derby and Oxbow won the Preakness.

Detail of the design.  This plate was for the horse Goldencents.

I wish the photos were better, but by the time the plates were done it was dark and I don't have a well-lighted photo area set up!  I used acrylics for use on ceramics on simple, white plates.  The edges were painted freehand with small pieces of sponge.  For the center parts I used a template so the plates would be as uniform as possible.  I designed the plate to incorporate the logo design for this year's race.

Illustration Friday: "Whisper" (With Process)

Mother Nature whispered, "It will be all right, little one."

I really wanted to do an optimistic sort of illustration this week.  This is a crow quill drawing on Canson bristol board.  The piece went through several sketches and line work practice studies, so I saved my scans and stages as I went along for a long-overdue process post.

Thumbnail sketch, approx. 2"x3"

Traced and revised from enlargement of thumbnail

Revisions in Photoshop

Digital line study over final sketch

Further work on the digital line study

Trying out a border

Final illustration

A Portrait of Shoes

My Mizunos

Shoes have so much life in them after we've worn them around for a while, don't they?  These are my old Mizuno running shoes.  They are old but not worn out, and very bored from lack of use lately.  I needed to do some trials and work on style anyway, so I made this shoe portrait in hopes that I might get inspired to lace them up and get out of my house!

I used ink and watercolor on Strathmore 400 series watercolor paper.

House Red With Mermaid

While I was waking up one day last week I imagined an image of a tiny mermaid, bored in a glass of wine.  It seemed like it could be kind of fun to draw, so instead of forgetting about it as I usually do with that kind of thing, I made this illustration.  I like it!  It's a little weird, but so what.  It could happen, right?

It's a crow quill pen and ink drawing on Strathmore Mixed Media paper/board.  I find that board takes ink very nicely.  Colored pencil looks good on it too, as does watercolor.  I wouldn't use it to do a watercolor painting or anything where the watercolor should be the focus.  But it works great for coloring an ink drawing with watercolor, where I want the ink drawing to be the focus!  It even allows me to rework a watercolor area a little bit without it looking "scrubby".  One bad thing about it is that it's too thick for me to trace a sketch onto it using a light table.  I have to trace with a transfer paper.  All in all it's a really nice, useful, great-looking paper.  Give it a try sometime!

"House Red With Mermaid" is available in my Society6 shop.

Illustration Friday: "Ocean"

This week gave me a chance to draw from Greek mythology, which I love to do!  Here's Poseidon, Greek god of the sea, riding on a charging hippocamp.  The original drawing was pen and ink on smooth paper.  I was experimenting with different line weights to create different tones without using crosshatching.  Then I colorized it and added the background in Photoshop.

"Poseidon" is available as an art print and more in my shop here.

Green Shoe

One of my new ACEOs, or as I like to call them, my "tinies".  The shoe is from my imagination.  I wish it were real!  Ink and watercolor.

Heart to Heart

I used to draw angels all the time when I was young because drawing the wings was so much fun.  I don't know why I stopped....I guess perhaps I've been drawing wings on birds instead.  But I also love drawing

fairies!  So these little angelfairies are a bit of both.  Plus they have great hair!  I call this illustration "Heart to Heart".  It's ink and watercolor.

"Heart to Heart" is available as a print and more in my shop here.

Illustration Friday: "Whiskers"

I've been working on this just for fun over the last few days and was excited to see it would work for Illustration Friday's prompt this week!  It's dedicated to all those, including me, who are trying to get a little exercise over the holiday season.  Good luck to us all!! 

Available as an art print, cards, t-shirts and more here.

Illustration Friday: "Water"

"Kisses from Fannie Finn"

I should have been designing business cards today, but instead I was working on this!  I hope you like it.  It's ink and watercolor.

"Fannie Finn" is available as a print, iPhone case, pillow and more at my
Society6 shop here.

Illustration Friday: "Tall"

"Sweet on Red"

The height of platform pumps has gotten ridiculous, to the point where they almost look like a joke.  But when I see pictures of women wearing them, they actually look pretty good!  This shoe is made up for this illustration, which is a pen and ink drawing colored with Prismacolor colored pencils.

A little mantra

This is a little mantra I say to myself when I'm stalled.  Or overwhelmed with my to-do list.  I figured it might be helpful to have it pinned to the wall so I can see it, so I illustrated it.  And it really works!  Yesterday my husband saw my sketchbook opened to the sketch for this and decided not to blow off his workout! 

It's a crow-quill pen and ink drawing that was colored and finished in Photoshop.

Available as a print here!

Romeo and Juliet (and process)

Hi everyone!  I wanted to share a new illustration.  And I'm happy to say I can actually post my process for this piece since I remembered to save the steps as I worked! 

I was dying to do some sort of interpretation of Romeo and Juliet.  You all know I'm hooked on romance!  So I grabbed my sketchbook to do some thumbnails and idea sketches.  One of the ideas kind of "stuck" with me so I scanned it, adjusted it and started working with and revising it.  I included a border design because I've been enjoying using decorative and graphic elements in my art lately.

Scan from my sketchbook

Rough redrawing

Final sketch

The final sketch doesn't have all the details drawn into it because I always get impatient doing too much with a final sketch.  I like deciding what the details will be and then just going for it in the final drawing!

I used a light table to trace the final sketch onto a piece of paper from my sketchbook.  I like the feel of the paper and the graphite drawing wasn't going to be final art anyway, so it didn't matter to me if the paper wasn't of great quality.

Graphite drawing

Then I scanned the graphite drawing into Photoshop, adjusted the lines for lightness/darkness and cleaned up the result.  But I didn't clean it up completely!  I wanted some of the qualities of sketchiness and graphite to remain.  I also transformed the angles and sizes of the heads and faces.

Digitally adjusted pencil drawing

From there I researched colorizing black and white photos in Photoshop.  I've never digitally colored a pencil drawing before and I figured the instructions for colorizing photos would translate as well as anything!  I played around with colors, which I think is the absolute best part of coloring digitally.  You can try whatever you want and not ruin your base art.

Color trials in Photoshop

One thing I tried that worked well for this piece was duplicating the line art layer in Photoshop and pasting it on top of the original one, set to "multiply" and at an opacity of 100%.  It really punched up the line art, which I thought was good since the colored graphite lines didn't look strong enough to me with only one line art layer.  The punched-up line drawing supported the color well too without losing any of the details I liked about the drawing. 

Final colors and details were worked out and rosy cheeks were added.  I also created and added a signature, something I hadn't bothered with earlier.

Final art

I'm really happy with how my "Romeo and Juliet" turned out.  It's about time I did a process post, eh?  I hope you enjoyed it.  As always, thanks for visiting!

Added June 6, 2013:  "Romeo and Juliet" is now available as an art print in my Society6 shop here.

Illustration Friday: "Lonely"

Illustration Friday: "Shiny"

This piece was created digitally in Adobe Photoshop.  I think it took longer to draw it digitally than it would have if I'd used a traditional pen and ink but I did like being able to use color, instantly correct mistakes and experiment without ruining anything.  And there was no risk of spilling or blooping ink!