Illustration Friday: Worry

I figured I'd kill two birds with one stone (no offense to the cardinal in the tree!) and use this latest piece for my Illustration Friday submission. It's hard to read the bird's expression from this distance, but take my word for it, he is very worried that cat is going to make good on that grin one of these days and gobble him up!

I've shown the three basic steps I did to create this illustration: pencil sketch, inked drawing and colored, final version. In this case, I colored the traditionally inked artwork in Photoshop. I've used Photoshop to color many times before but never quite this way. I used a combination of different digital brushes set at varying degrees of opacity in addition to gradients and other tools/effects to achieve the desired result. I also colored the black line art which is something I've never done before.

Overall I'm happy with it considering it's my first color job that was done in this digital painting style (and without the benefit of one of those nifty Wacom tablets that comes with a pressure-sensitive stylus and special software.) I colored this crude and dirty the old-fashioned way using a mouse, which for this type of work is like drawing/coloring with a potato (go ahead and try it someday--not an easy feat!)

This is a "pet project" (couldn't resist the pun...) for my aunt. I spent way more time on it than she was expecting in part so I could get another portfolio piece out of it. Not sure I totally hit this one out of the park, but I'm fairly confident my aunt will be ecstatic to see her beloved cat "Penny" immortalized in digital paint.