Picture Story update: lightshine

Procrastination — who doesn't? Maybe people with personal planners who worry about schedules or something? Well, I'm not one of those people I guess. So, in theory, I took the week off from working on the calendar. I mean, last week I finished the second illustration (only 10 more to go). But there was something about the next picture on the docket that I'm just not ready to commit to or in the mood to work on, so I'm going to shove that to some far off back corner of my mind until I generate a solution — not unlike one of those 'moments' on House - where Wilson would be blathering on about something and House would have that epiphany about exactly what malady or combination of maladies the patient had.

So, on a whim, I decided that instead of plowing through another illustration I was going to rework something that had always bothered me about one of my older illustrations...

"lightshine"

 the original version...

and the new and improved version:

It wasn't really until 2002 that I started illustrating in a fashion that involved a lot of photoshop. Before then everything was colored pencils and bristol. Sketches were transferred from my sketchbook to the bristol via tracing paper, and well, that was it... and then time marched on and now I end up interfacing a lot of things on the computer. Technically, I guess it saves me the trouble of drawing the picture 4 times before I color it (sketch it, trace it, color the back of the trace, draw the trace onto paper)...

So, it was in June of 2009 that I made "lightshine." And it was my first endeavor with computer generated sunshine. The original looks okay and all, and I vaguely remember how I formatted the whole thing, but I was never exactly thrilled with how it looked.  It was very flat and thin and like two-dimensional. Plus I played with feathering, blur, and layer styles — probably for the first time.

It was later in November of 2009 when I was working on penguin pals that I took a more calculated effort in making rays of sunshine:

 This is how it began (above) — and after some toggling with tools and copying, pasting, and rotating — this is how it looked:

These were my initial efforts, and they ended up here:

 penguin pals

 You see those 4 lines there — that emanate from the sun? They annoy me. Something wasn't quite aligned right or sized right...
I would subsequently remake the file for the sunshine into this:

Very "Wizard of Op" — I know ; ) That is, btw, like the coolest book I read as a child.

Anyway, that was the fix that I used when I was working on what I think of as the sunshine illustrations, which include this:

yellow warblers sunshine song

Subsequently, when I decided to fix the sunshine on lightshine some 3 years later — that's the file I referenced. So, now I'm happy with the way the picture looks. You can check out the new and improved "lightshine" here.

Yeah, so now I guess it's time to get back to illustration 3 for the calendar...
Have a lovely weekend!