Illustration Friday: Fortune

Today's forecast is rainy, with an 80% chance of severe blessings. So don't look so gloomy!
My process was drawing by hand and then coloring in Photoshop.
Many thanks to the ubiquitous monster for modelling.

Illustration Friday: Green

I'm still trying to make friends with guoache (even though I can't even spell it). Otherwise, this was fun. It almost turned out as a portrait of my own parents (who are not strawberries). They raised their share of teenagers, and from what I understand, it wasn't always peaches and cream.

Legend of Sleepy Hollow illustration

The assignment was to illustrate a scene from the story, "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow." I chose to set the scene for later events by showing Ichabod's superstitions and love of ghost tales, and also showing the dreamy, bewitching atmosphere of the landscape that the author describes so well. We got to choose to do it entirely digitally, or partially with traditional methods. I've missed painting this last while, so I was happy to dig up my acrylics and go to town, then finish up on the computer. Hopefully the process was successful. Painting on the computer was definitely helpful in restoring the darks that were lost in the thin acrylic painting, and in cleaning up my clumsy edges. I really tried to focus on keeping my colors alive (something I don't usually do very well). Perhaps they are a little out of control, but at least they're not dead!

This painting has magnified for me a feeling I've had lately of really reaching and stretching for something in painting. . . I always have the feeling the images could be so much cooler, if only I had the vision, the technical skills. . .and didn't make so many mistakes. But I'm learning. (And yes, I had fun with this one).

Process Ichabod

Here we have a not-so-fabulous photograph of the acrylic painting at the point I decided to go digital. It's pretty rough, still. I also did a quick color study on the computer before starting to paint, but I won't offend your aesthetic sensibilities by including that here.

This is the drawing transferred onto illustration board with graphite paper. Now I get to bust out the acrylics, laying down a light wash to start things off.

This is the final drawing, where I tried to work out all the design problems.

And here is one of the rough idea sketches-how the whole thing got started.