WIP

Welcome welcome lovely reader!

On this page you can find several WIP posts on how I create my illustrations.  I thought it would be fun for you to see how an illustration comes to live. Some posts will have a detailed description with the things I did and others are just Staring posts. All in all, it's a peek in my Mind and how I create my work!!


Other WIPs - The first link is always the most up-to-date post
October 2012 - Mysterious Creepy Lady (It's a video!!)
September 2012 - Sahel the Goddess of Nature
August 2012 - Dragons, Dragons, Dragons.
May 2012 - Floating Cupcakes
March 2012 - Koalas, Koalas, Koalas
April 2011 - Tropical Fluffiness
March 2011 - Flower Girl Ivy Liliana

October 2010 - WIP Sing My Pumpkins, Sing.
This is my first WIP post, created in October 2010. It's for a charity calendar for the organization called Diva Day. Twelve illustrators, including me, got the very cool opportunity to create an illustration for the calendar. I got the month October (my birthday month!!). Thanks for the opportunity mr. Griffin!

The only requirements were that we had to include a female character and if possible a musical element. Other than this...complete freedom! First step is...brainstorming. Well it was pretty clear from the start that I wanted to give it a Halloween feel to it and add a cello to it. I choose a cello, because I think it's an amazing & powerful instrument. It would complement the delicate features of the lady character. This brought me to another element of the drawing...I didn't want it to be like the chibi drawings I did here. I wanted to give a more mysterious feeling to it. So I started sketching and I got several ideas. First I wanted to create a nature environment, then I switched to a dark room with lots of Halloween elements in it. Well I can try to explain how this part works, but it's kinda chaotic and not sure if I would make sense haha. The drawings are just a bunch of lines on paper on this stage. And even though you would see the sketches, you wouldn't see what I wanted to create immediately. Sometimes I just need to have loose lines on paper, to get the first urge of drawing out my system. At this stage I'm probably the only one who can 'read' the drawings. I hope that made sort of sense.

The sketching process took several days. I kept adding and erasing elements, because it didn't feel quite right. In the end I switched back to a nature environment. reason for this is that I already painted several Halloween illustrations while I was sketching stuff for this and the idea of a purple sky seemed perfect!

I suggest to enlarge the pictures for a better view. Final sketch looked like this.

As you can see I taped the Pumpkin lady on top of a bigger sheet, because I drew her separately. After this I will ink the correct lines, so it's easier for me to draw the entire illustration on the correct paper.

So now I had my complete sketch and it's time to transfer it to correct paper. I used a medium sized lightbox to draw it again. And final inkage of the illustration is here.

It looks so plain! As you can see I also added more pumpkins to it and made some other changes here and there. When I'm drawing the final illustration I find myself making changes all the time, because what looked good at first, might look not so good later. It's painting time now and have to admit...I didn't quite know how to start. There were lots of details and I never used a masking fluid to block out certain areas before and I didn't want to try it out on this illustration, because I was afraid that I would damage the paper and I didn't want to draw the entire thing again! So I had to think what colors I would use before hand. Usually I just start painting and add colors along the way. I left it aside for a day and then I added a light wash of color.

After this it's just adding layers of color. I don't know from the start how many layers I'll exactly use to complete an illustration. For this I thought it would be around 4 layers. It really depends on the intensity I want to get with it in the end. I focused on the Pumpkin Lady at first, because I wanted that to have all the attention & depth.

To give an idea of how I paint, well I wish you could just see it in person haha. But in short, I always mix colors together to create the color I want and then I add a wash on paper. When a layer is still wet I add a darker/lighter color in it to have a highlight or shade. Example: to create a certain depth around the pumpkin I added a darker color at the edges of the pumpkins, with a orange/brown color. Then I blend this further out with a orange/yellow color. This I repeat like two to three times.

While I worked on this, I was working on several other small illustrations, so I didn't have to wait that long when I had to add a new layer. Ooh efficient use of my time hehe. This is the final result with a close up at the Pumpkin Lady. Until this stage I kept the cello uncolored. I just couldn't find the correct colors to paint it with and I didn't want to use another orange-y color. So my Creative Partner in Crime, Ms. Claire, gave a link to a cello with an old brown color. It sparked the idea to color the cello I did below, with a cooler blue/purple shade around the edges!

Tadaa! It is finished! I have to say that I'm quite pleased with the end result and I'm quite the perfectionist when it comes to my illustrations. It took some time to paint it, because I had to paint around lots of details and make sure it still looked good in the end. I will look into masking fluid and see how that works for me. I already have a few ideas for larger illustrations hehe.

Soooo what do you think about it? Feel free to leave comments here or on the post that linked you to this page. You can ask questions, give tips or things you would like to share. Anything is possible.

Thanks for sticking through the end & Hope you liked it!