Illustration Friday- WOOL

This week's illustration topic was wool!  Fun!  I couldn't wait to try out something new, and here's how it ended up. 

I love the look of a mix of traditional and digital techniques, and I've really been wanting to play with it more to see what I can come up with.  So here's how I got this particular look.

We've been working with soft pastels in drawing class, so I thought I'd give them a try this week to draw some sheep.  To be honest, I've been struggling with them for some reason, so any chance to use them more is a good thing.  Then I added a streaky sky with my watercolor pencils.  And here's the image I started with:

Not too pretty yet.  But I knew I was going to just use it to play around digitally, so it didn't have to look great or finished at this point.  So first I scanned it and deepened the colors a bit in Photoshop.  Then I took it into Illustrator and tried the different live trace settings to see how I could get it to look. 

I ended up liking parts of the Color 6, Simple Trace, and Comic Book versions, so I saved each of them and then took everything back into Photoshop.

That's when I got to have fun, cut apart the images, use the parts I liked & delete what I didn't like, mess with the layer modes, rearrange, flip, duplicate parts, change the colors, and basically collage everything into my final image!

How do you think it turned out? 

You can go check out all the other "wool" themed illustrations at Illustration Friday!




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Illustration Friday- Wheels

Pinwheels!

As soon as I saw last week's topic of wheels, this image almost immediately came to mind after deciding to go with pinwheels.  Isn't he cute?  I sort of think he's my husband as a kid. 

The stomach flu chewed us up and spit us out earlier this week, but I had to get this entry in just at the buzzer!

Happy weekend, everyone!

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Illustration Friday- Wings

I've been seeing some bloggers and artists mentioning the website Illustration Friday and I thought I'd go see what it was all about. 

It's a fun weekly art challenge that anyone can participate in.  Each week there is a theme, and you can draw, paint, create, doodle, etc. your interpretation of the theme, and then link up your image for all to see! 

I think this is a good chance for me to try new techniques and topics that I may not do for myself or for school work, and it will be a good way for me to learn more and experiment without any pressure to make it 'perfect.'

This week's topic was WINGS.

I drew this in ink in my little 7x7 sketchbook, and I didn't even plan it out right and it ran off the page, hence the obvious break in the page right at the swan's head. 

Then I scanned it, painted it loosely in Photoshop and then ran the sponge filter on the paint layer. 

It's actually based off of a bird called the whooper swan I found in an article in National Geographic magazine.  The pictures were so beautiful; the swans are really plain bright white with black feet, and the setting was a snow covered wonderland. 

Are there any other art/ drawing challenges I should know about? 

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