Little Women

I decided to try my hand at the Tomie dePaola award this year.  This year's challenge was to illustrate a scene in black and white from either the Yearling, Little Women, or Tom Sawyer.

As I cannot resist anything old-timey involving girls in bonnets and big dresses, I chose Little Women.

This was my original rough sketch, showing Jo editing her first novel. While I liked the idea of the white pages against the dark colored desk, ultimately I didn't feel passionate about this image and decided to go with something different.

So, here's my entry:

This one is almost all digital, with some pencil here and there.  I started with a very rough pencil sketch that I scanned and painted it in Photoshop.

Wintry scene

Some fun with Photoshop; a fox in the snow.  It is without question much more fun to draw something completely random and not at all in my style rather than drawing something I am supposed to be working on.

Regardless, foxes are always fun to draw.

Manga Studio Inking Experiment

More gigantic hair for you.

I don't usually draw much in this style anymore, but I recently purchased Manga Studio since they were having a 90% off sale.  It's a lot of fun to play around with, and is great for inking.  The software is primarily designed for comic and manga artists, and there are tools for creating panels and inserting text easily.  But for any artist or illustrator who wants to do digital inking, I've found Manga Studio to be far easier for inking than Photoshop, and it delivers a very nice, crisp line.  The files can be exported as Photoshop files, so this image was inked in Manga Studio and colored in Photoshop.

Overall, I'm really happy with Manga Studio even though it may just be feeding my love of drawing hair.