SunSwallow

I've been working this week on a commission for a lady in America who wanted a creature created by mixing a sunfish and a swallow. There is a lovely story to go with this and although the artwork was meant as a surprise for her partner, she couldn't wait to show him. I decided to take some photos along the way so that she could see the process involved in making her artwork.

1. First some of my better roughs were emailed and a design selected.

2. Original Drawing scanned, printed larger and then transferred to paper using Tracedown.

3. Original markings erased so that image just shows through - enough to make an ink outline, using pen. 

4. The start of shading in the image using pen. 

5. The final artwork which is then scanned and opened in Photoshop.

6. SunSwallow selected and background deleted. I used a mask and brush tool to tidy up the edges of the image, duplicated the layer and adjusted the histogram and contrast to match the original more closely.

7. The original document was saved, flattened and then dragged to a new document with the required image size. The outside of the image was cropped and then the final image saved. The original .psd file remains intact with all its layers. 

SunSwallow by Maria Forrester

Inside Book Illustration

My All

I recently completed a commission for a short story illustration. The image was created using watercolour, graphite crayon, charcoal, pen and acrylic paint and as always finalised in Photoshop. The story had a slightly dark tone so I wanted to try and capture this feeling in the work.