digital vs. natural media

time of day: afternoon
weather: overcast with a chance of rain
music: Sharon Jones
feeling: quite good, thank you.

I seem to find myself with a fair bit of time on my hands. My graphic design contract wasn't renewed because the guy I was replacing decided to return (bastard!) but they have kept me on one day a week to finish up some projects, which is at least something while I look for more work. I've got some freelance projects to keep me going and in the mean time I'm taking the time to draw and experiment with different media. I've set myself the following things to do on each "home day":

-1 illustration thing
-1 business thing
-1 house thing
-1 garden thing (weather permitting)
-1 exercise thing
-1 relaxing thing
-1 fun thing

and so today, it's 4:30 and all I've done is the illustration thing. well 2 actually. so at least I'm off the hook for that one for tomorrow! But here it is. It was inspired by my foray into the garden yesterday when I meant to do some weeding but ended up doing damage control, cutting back this vine that had totally taken over the backyard. I wanted the illo to feel really jungly with lots of different greens, and make it obvious with colouring that the vine was taking away the snippers, which got a bit lost in the linework. The first one is done with inked outline and watercolour pencil:

It all gets a bit lost. there are some nice textures, but the snippers aren't obvious at all, and also the ink I used bled a lot and made the whole thing muddy. And admittedly my skills with actual watercolour aren't that great. Satisfied, but not really happy with it.
Done in Painter:

This is more what I was going for, with different greens and the snippers stand out more. This is using the same linework (scanned). I also changed the border colour cause it was too yellow/green. In general I'm much happier with this.

so far, digital 1, natural 0. I may have to get some non-bleeding ink, and try real watercolours where I am not limited by the colours of the pencils. Wish me luck!