Sweet Summer Rain

This was intended to be submitted last night for this past week's Illustration Friday prompt but it didn't quite make it in under the wire and I wanted to be satisfied with it rather than display something I was unhappy with. And so here it is on the blog! The given prompt was "dessert," and I've seen my fair share of ice cream being eaten and worn this summer so I thought it was only fitting. I recently discovered an even better way to transfer line into Photoshop so that it maintains its integrity and subtlety, so this week I wanted to take full advantage of that. And so, as I usually do, I began with a sketch:

And from that sketch came a more resolved drawing and finally a finished drawing done with graphite on vellum, scanned in, the line isolated, and a quick background color laid in to give a bit more context before going into flats:

This next step might be the most time-consuming, tedious, and a bit thankless actually. It's hard to keep your head above water when the water looks like an undulating paint-by-numbers ocean. However, in the long run laying in flats is totally worthwhile and really advantageous for color isolation and really quick color manipulation from a higher layer. Basically the idea behind flats is this: so long as the adjacent areas aren't the same color (or similar for that matter) you can block out all the major areas and then quickly color them by selecting them with the wand tool and adding the appropriate colors later. Here are my flats:

Like I said above, this makes it easy to then determine the primary colors that you want to use, and here they are (immediately after having finished flats):

After this point is when I can start to resolve and soften the edges a bit more and put in some cleaner and more satisfying points of transition (particularly in her face and grass). Also I drew in the sweet summer rain itself, the falling drips of ice cream. I wanted to do them digitally because I thought it would be pleasing to draw attention to their presence stylistically to provide a point of interest through contrast, and I'm glad I did. Here's the final paint layer before laying the linework back in:

And here's the final image again, linework and all:

Overall I am really pleased with how this piece came out, and I am definitely excited for what the future holds.

Also I wanted to have a link to a clip of Daniel von Bargen saying "Sweet summer rain" from Oh Brother, Where Art Thou? but I couldn't find it on YouTube, so use your imagination.

So there you have it, my most recent piece from start to finish (mostly), although admittedly very abridged. I hope that this sheds a bit more light on some parts of the process that I hadn't addressed previously. Look for a few more pieces being added next week sometime, and hopefully an Illustration Friday post that will present itself in a timely fashion (I'm thinking something quicker, good sweet bippy!) Thanks for stopping by, and happy viewing!