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

Picture Story: spring sing

Technically, I was on vacation this week. Vacation, as it turns out was mostly about sleeping and not having to wake up at the sound of an alarm clock. Plus it was about getting some work done on some projects that I have been procrastinating on for a long long time. I am a hell of a procrastinator. But, I did finally take all the snowflakes down — my winter decor consists of my ginormous collection of plastic / resin glitter covered snowflakes (see this post for my hilarious prediction).

Anyway, now I have to hang the butterflies and the hummingbirds... which I just haven't quite gotten to yet.

In the mean time — a picture story: spring sing.
I finished this illustration in the spring of 2009 (see last graphic), but I probably technically started it around 2005. This first graphic is actually a painting. It was painted with acrylics with details done in prismacolor on illustration board. The original is actually 11X14 inches. But via the magic of a scan and a size format change in photoshop it became an 8X10.

What I actually did was I flipped the image horizontally, and then lightened the resized copy of the painting in photoshop and then printed that and drew an outline around everything. Then I scanned that outlined copy and adjusted the file until all I had was the outline on a white background.

When I have an inked copy, then I make a sample fill of every part as a separate layer. So I fill all the tulip flowers with one color, all the petals with one color, the grass, the tree trunks, the leaves, the sky, and the clouds. Because I am going to use scans or paintings or drawings, or digital photos to actually fill in the those parts.

This is a size reformatted portion of a scan of an 11X14 acrylic painting called "geranium sunrise." It's what would eventually become the background of "spring sing." Of course, I had to reformat it 8X10, and then I would go on to lighten the entire painting by creating a layer of white, playing with its opacity and then merging that to the layer of the scan of the painting.

The yellow warblers that appear in the painting were drawn separately. They were drawn with prismacolors. That drawing was scanned, and all the white space was removed. The clouds were created using the paintbrush in photoshop, and then using a layer fill style over the background. The sheet music that appears in the background was scanned, and then manipulated using the warp tool so that it is wavy instead of linear.

The leaves of the trees were created from a digital photo that was manipulated and resized. The original image is actually of maple leaves on the ground. The tree trunks were created from a layer I created by layering several different colors with several different brushes and then using filtering effects in photoshop.

The grass was also created from a photo. It's actually a picture of the grass in my neighbors yard (and this particular photo has been used in a number of my illustrations when I need grass, which I always think is kind of funny since my neighbor will mow his lawn on a diagonal and this shot is clearly of some grass that hasn't yet been cut) . The tulip flowers and leaves were both taken from the same scan that was used for the background.

And through the magic of layering styles all these things come together to create the illustration. You can see the finished piece here in my "sarahkdesigns" shop on Etsy.

If you're anywhere near Tecumseh, Michigan: Friday 29 April 2011 is the annual Tecumseh Art Walk. I'll be at Timeless Stitches, so if you're in town, then please stop by. The event is 6-9pm.

I hope everyone is enjoying their spring : )