If you saw my last blog post, you know that I was struggling with my most recent illustration for a children’s story I wrote called “The Big Mean Cat”.
I was pretty happy with the picture I’d done just before that one–the picture of the cat watching the puppy eat from his cat food bowl. Maybe I was a little over-confident going into this most recent picture, which shows the cat shoving the puppy into his pet bed.
A reminder–this is my first time trying to illustrate anything, and while I’ve done some painting, I’m totally out of my element with this kind of topic and the media I chose to use–color pencils. I usually paint things like seascapes or dots on rocks.
This photo shows where I left off at the end of my last post. I was frustrated at the oily appearance (which looked worse on the actual picture) around the animals, caused by my use of odorless paint thinner to blend the color pencils. I couldn’t figure out how to fix it, and wasn’t certain I wanted to waste time finishing the picture.
I was leaning toward tossing it and starting over, which I’ve had to do before for different reasons.
My daughter has a background in graphic design, and will be helping me prepare my text and pictures for self-publication on CreateSpace. When I showed her what had happened, she assured me that she could make it look better.
I’ll admit that I was tempted to just call it a day and let her do her magic. But my conscience got the better of me, and I decided to work on it a little more before either throwing it away or having my daughter fix my mistakes.
I got out my pencils and pastels a while ago, and went to work on making repairs and finishing details. And while I know it still isn’t a great picture, it looks better than it did.
And of course, when my daughter gets a hold of it, she’ll do a little graphic design hocus pocus and make it look even better.
So, I’m setting this one aside and on to the next one. I have several more pictures to create, and I’m getting antsy. I want to get back to the writing part of the process.
ChessieWriter 