This little girl is a watercolor and she is on her own in Pumpkinville. She brought a few miniature jack-o-lanterns with her to the fall party. She was surprised to see lots of blue cats everywhere. My goodness, what a creative thinker she is to explore this territory all by herself.
I decided to edit the painting digitally and present it as a circle. It has an old fashioned quality to me and I thought that there is enough fantasy here to play a little.
Here is the image on products.
These three little letters were an idea I had a long time ago and I did not forget about them. I love drawing and sketching little critters and I hope I can get a complete alphabet one day of little marching letters. When I drew them the sketch had little white feet of some kind and I carried it through here in the photoshop drawing.
The red and green above are the original ideas which I managed to save from oblivion.
I love the little legs and I think if I can be consistent throughout the alphabet on treatment of this kind of nice flowing design, white feet, treatment on their heads and eyes especially and the thick and thin variety in the black lines, I hope I may actually have something here. I did do an alphabet a long time ago and here is one letter done in scratchboard and gold. I can’t find it right now but it will show up. It was pretty awesome.
Of course, I know I’m going about this in the wrong way because these should be done in vector in AI and to do them as bitmap in photoshop is pretty labor intensive. But….I wanted to get the idea down why I still remember it. Also I have lots of brushing up to do in Illustrator and photoshop is right now easier for me.
This kitty is covered in orchids. I had orchids sitting in front of me from my patio garden and I drew the simple outline of kitty, added wings, a little bird and some fun and not so ordinary color palette. Then I drew abstract fragments of the flowers on his body. The little bird ended up having one of his wings looking like another bird facing in the opposite direction. a perk from heaven.
The font is Gigi. I got the color just by going down a few shades darker than the orchid flower on the color wheel. The whole drawing was done in photoshop with a few simple brushes. lots of layers: orig. scanned art, outline, coloring, text, and a white layer in there to be able to see what it finally would look like.
I love getting comments. Let me know what you think: either about this revision series or any comments on the art are appreciated.
This is the new artwork with text. On the right is the art with no text.
From the nursery rhyme the 1st paragraph of Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary is illustrated here. This painting is a digital drawing and painting of my own idea. I have tried to use colors and text that engage a nostalgic mood. Mary, Mary was quite the contrary miss, I think.
What started out as a cool idea and something nice to do on a quiet Sunday ended up being a 6 hour project….from the idea to the photoshop drawing and painting to the addition of text. I made 2 versions, one with text and one without. I ended up only listing the one version with text online.
What can I say except I love drawing like this and playing with text. When I moved from the U.S. I left all my fabulous books and films behind. For 40+ years, I had collected “primers” which in my collection, dated back to the 1880’s.
They were old beautiful books that I treasured and cherished. Primers were children’s elementary readers. Heads up on this one. The vocabulary, language in general was very sophisticated and advanced. I had a 5th grade reader which was equivalent to what would now be 1st year high school. There was no photography and dot printing had not been invented yet. So all the art was line art only. That is where I learned the fundamentals of drawing in grey scale by not using grey scale but using line art and the idea that drawing was an optical illusion. The width of the lines conveyed the tonal values. That led to my 30 years of drawing in scratchboard. I drew for over 25 years only in black and white and I am not ashamed to say it. I also learned about scale from primers. Think about this: Convey a mountain with a few people on top of it…don’t forget to include the clouds, the weather, the country, etc etc .then ask yourself if it conveys a mood as well as giving all that info? The storyboard was alive at the turn of the century for sure. All the rules and success of animation are in the old primers.
All of these principles have basically never changed. You become a better artist when you learn digital media because basically art is science. Photoshop and Illustrator are basically science and math is your friend. After one month of working hard and trying to remember my old skills, they are coming back. Now that I have the desire to use typography, this is just another icing on the cake.
Here is a product with this 100% digital art.
Painting Mexico 
You must be logged in to post a comment.