Carnevale a Venezia

"Carnevale a Venezia" is my entry for the Enchanted Doll Birthday Contest 2013 (by the way, I have seen some entries from the forum people and they look absolutely gorgeous...so the competition is hard!).

I chose Venice as my ideal destination, because I am enamored with its elegance, ancient history, and innate fragility. It's a dream of gold and lace floating on the water always on the brink of disappearing under the waves. I have traveled a bit and seen lovely places, more exotic and adventurous than Venice, but my heart is in my country and because I live far away I the desire to go back burns particularly strong. Most of all I wish to visit with my little Bella and share with her the pleasure of visiting this jewel of a city.

As for the Carnevale, the costumes and masks are so inventive, opulent, and mysterious that I've always been fashinated and maybe also a bit intimidated by them. So, to me it would be great to return to Venice during the Carnevale.

I wanted to really stick with the traditional postcard design and feel, yet personalize it. 

One issue was that postcards are rather small (4x6, as per the rules of the contest) and this poses a challenge to me, because I like to draw tons of little details, but on such a small canvas this was going to be impossible. My solution was to draw on a regular 9x12 sheet, take a picture of it, send it to Shutterfly or some other printing service and turn it into a pretty neat postcard.

The plan was pretty straight forward. The implementation... not so much. 

Here is the pencil sketch, which I started mid January...I had a lot of fun drawing San Marco's Cathedral.

 

 ...but it was a lot of work inking it!

Here I am at the end of January with still most of the difficult parts still to tackle.

 

In order to give the impression of distance, instead of using my usual black Copic Multiliner (0.03), I switched to one of the newer Multiliners in grey (with a 0.05) to ink the church. I think it worked well, especially when I added the colors.

Coloring was quick and fun...so here is the final drawing:

At this point (around Valentine's Day), I took a nice picture of the drawing and tried to send it to print...too bad I did not account for the fact that it takes at least a week for the actual printing job to be completed and then a couple of days to get it back home for the finishing touches. The contest deadline was February 28th! Bottom line, with this course of action, I would never have made the deadline...How could I have neglected these details!!!

In the end, I sent the picture to be printed at the local Walgreen's...where they actually butchered the color depth, in my opinion, but I had no time to be picky, so I settled for it.

I then attached the drawing to a same size piece of watercolor paper, and decorated the back of the card to make it look like an actual Italian postcard.

 

This is actually a reproduction of an actual stamp issued in 1973 that in turn used a painting by the Venetian painter Vittore Carpaccio (1465 – 1525/1526)...see below:

I am pretty happy with how it turned out.

Well, I got it out just on time! For a while it was stuck at the post office in Vancouver (oh nooo!), but the ED team picked it up a few days ago and Marina also gave an extension to the contest deadline (March 3) so all is well.