Welcome Virginia!

This is a card that I did recently. It was inspired by photos of the beautiful, brand new baby of a fellow illustrator. This is the final version with type added in Photoshop. Lots of colored pencil. This is one technique that I use. I hadn't used colored pencil for a long time. Most of what I do in color these days is painted in Alkyds. It was nice to get back to the pencils for this piece though. Below, you can see the steps to it's completion - in reverse order. I did greeting cards years ago. It was nice to get back to that too, with a little different, hopefully updated style. Updated, at least to the style that feels more like me these days - for this type of thing. Still experimenting with the ratio of paint to pencil though - as well as the type of paint.


Here's the underpainting. Light acrylic washes. I'm not good at blending acrylics, but they lay the groundwork for the next step - colored pencil. This is a bit of an experiment. Similar to the way I've worked in the distant past, but also a little different. Long technical story!


I suppose I should show the earliset versions of this sketch - much messier! That makes for a richer looking sketch, but mine tend to be so messy that they can be hard for anyone but me to read. This very clean version is what I print onto watercolor paper to produce the finish. I print at a low opacity so that nothing will show through on the final version. My earlier, messier sketch was also much more realistic. It looked like a Gerber baby. Not that there's anything wrong with that! It just felt way too realistic for me --- now.