Hansel, Gretel, etc.

My sister in law is coming to visit with her family (Pit will spend some quality time with Bella!). I am making a drawing to celebrate her birthday and the fact that we are going to have a new addition to the family soon. She asked for a Hansel and Gretel inspired picture, with the ginger bread house and the children, but without the scary witch.
Here is the initial sketch with some inking done...

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.

Night Flight Complete

As promised, here is the finished version of Night Flight!

Night Flight WIP

I am about to finish the second panel for Pit's theater. If  "The secret of the forest" could be considered the beginning  of the three young heroes' magical journey, this second piece, "Night flight" represents its ending. After many adventures, challenges, and discoveries, it's time to get back to the warm safety of home. Within the castle a portal will open that will return the children to their world. A few friends met along their winding road will accompany them to the threshold between the two universes.

This one took quite a while...May was a very busy month with work and spring related activities. But I am glad I'll be able to finish this in time for Pit's B-day.
Here is the WIP for this piece. Tomorrow I'll show you the finished version.

Here is the initial pencil drawing. It took me quite a while to draw all the tiny little houses on the shore. I am not very strong with horses, so I had to try several time before coming up with a decent Pegasus..still I suppose that my equine anatomy could use some improvement...;)

Of course this is the inking. I rather enjoyed this process, although the tip of my Microliner was at the end of its days and I had to change it half way through....so the thickness of the lines is rather unequal, but thankfully, once colored this is almost unnoticeable...;)

Here I started putting down some greys to define the shadowed areas and create a base that should keep my colors from going to bright and garish....(always fighting that battle...)

So, at this point I was regretting not leaving everything in black and white, as the sea seemed to overwhelm everything else. As I draw, I always get to a panic paralysis point. This was it in this case. I tried to downplay the sea adding tons of grey to the waves, which improved things a bit.

Getting there...the sky was fun...now the sea seems less predominant. Still there are a few details to complete. Hopefully, tomorrow "Night Flight" will be completed!

The secret of the forest

Hello again! After many days (I should say evening) of work and despite the busy period at work, the first panel of the theater project is finally done. Here is the WIP and the completed drawing. Enjoy!

                 

 

I should add that the fox and crow are a homage to Pit's great grandma and her famous rendition of the ages old tale of "Le corbeau et le renard". When my husband and his sister, Pit's mom, were children, she used to tell the story to put them to sleep. Things did not really go as she expected. She would start the tale in french "Maître Corbeau, sur un arbre perché, Tenait en son bec un fromage..." and then she would promptly fall asleep with great merryment of her audience. It's a sweet family memory that we all want to share with little Pit...and here is my contribution. ^^