Picture Story: the rainy fox

Hey, have I mentioned the calendar? Yeah, I know. It's kind of my fixation for the until 25 December. So, one illustration was completed last week and now I've finished another.

The rainy fox started out as a sketch that I drew while waiting to get an oil change for my car... I scanned the sketch, printed it as a blue page, inked the blue page, and scanned that back in and made it into a file.

There's a decision that I made about this illustration: no outlines. In my pre-digital illustrating days — objects in pictures never had outlines and everything was rendered by hand with colored pencil... somehow when pen & ink enters into the picture - there end up being outlines, and I decided that this picture would be outline free — so I "blocked" my picture so that it had no outlines. Blocking is a fairly arbitrary process - you just fill the parts of the picture with color. And I guess color schemes are just kind of inherent, at least they are to me. Even if I'm not precisely sure what I think a picture should look like when done - I have a vague idea of the colors, tone, mood, and presentation... 

You know, the sky isn't aqua blue with white clouds, and the ground isn't peacock green.

Since it's the picture for November — the original sketch has some raindrops penciled in, and "the rainy fox" is scrawled across the bottom of the page. So, when it came time to fill in my blocked file — I picked photos of leaves on the ground and a scan of a watercolor that fit that mood and then superimposed them over my layer of color blocking.

The tree is always the truly labor intensive part of the picture. I select some of my digital photos of tree bark and manipulate them in photoshop to turn a couple photos into a full tree.

So, once I have the colors the way I want them, and the layer overlays of photos or paintings for texture or effect — then it's time to print that image in order to draw over it with prismacolors.

I started by coloring in the details on the fox.

And then I gave the tree the illusion of dimensionality...

 And then it was time to color in the clouds and add the rain...

So, in the end, what started as a sketch becomes a full color illustration:

the rainy fox — Sarah Knight