About a week before my son Hank decided to arrive early, I had some time on my hands to doodle some of Hera’s toddler outfits she outgrew this year… had a little time today so thought I’d share the latest for my illustrated diary of Hera’s outfits. They are all pen doodles with watercolour washes done in my sketchbook… haven’t done much watercolour on plain bond paper before, and found it made for very warped paper afterwards! Wouldn’t recommend it for a lot of layering of colours, but for a quick study it’s fun.

Here’s another study of an outfit for my diary of Hera’s stuff, a little blue & white swimsuit done in pencil crayon on black paper. Fun working chiaroscuro (on a dark surface, illustrating from dark to light.)

I’ve worked on this pantone paper before (in acrylic here & here), and enjoyed working on it again this time with pencil for a study of a little yellow & pink sundress for my illustrated diary of Hera’s outfits. I’ve left the trip across the top, I like remembering how old that paper is and glad to have rescued it from the trash while my college was renovating and clearing out unwanted junk.

Was getting a bit bored of working with pen & digital colour, so dug through my scrap art paper and found some different shades to work on for a few more outfits for my illustrated diary of Hera’s outfits. Here’s a pencil study of a poncho she wore all last winter.

Here’s a little pen & watercolour drawing I doodled out recently for my Diary of Hera’s Stuff. Was a bit of a feat finishing this illustration as Hera kept stealing the socks!

This is a bit of a sentimental illustration. We just bought Hera a dollhouse at a garage sale and she’s loving it. My sister & I had an antique dollhouse as a kid that we loved playing with… we had Sylvanians in the 80’s, my sister had the bunny family, I had the mouse family. Somewhere along the line with moving around over the years we got rid of much of our childhood toys, and I didn’t think of them until we bought this dollhouse.

So with my own daughter coming up to dollhouse age, I went a bit crazy searching on eBay for vintage dollhouse furniture (can’t bear to stuff a dollhouse full of plastic furniture!) …and I teared up when I discovered the exact mouse family I used to have. I won the auction, and was thrilled to find it was in mint condition, one mouse even had the original sticker on the bottom dated 1985! I have to remind myself they are for HERA, not ME! (Am glad Hera’s too little to have her Christmas present spoiled by me posting this on the internet)

Here’s another of my drawings for my diary of Hera’s stuff, a little Oilily top with Peruvian doll pattern. I used a completely different “medium” for colouring this illustration digitally… used my iPad! I’ve been loving my iPad (my 30th birthday present) and I use it more than my imac now due to its portability and super functional apps.

So this weekend I took the plunge, broke the bank and spent $7.95 to buy Sketchbook Pro, the acclaimed sketching app for the ipad by Autodesk… and LOVE it. I’m not much of a digital illustrator, but I do like to colour my pen/pencil drawings on occasion on the computer.

I gave it a go yesterday for the first time, and must say it’s a much nicer experience colouring on screen with my fingertips than it is using a digital pen and looking up at a monitor. Not to mention was pretty cool being able to draw on my iPad away from the computer snuggled up in bed! It’s extremely intuitive to use, and aside from a few pages showing you how to use the program I didn’t need to look up any supporting documentation to figure out how to adapt it to my illustration style. From start to finish, the app is very simple to use, I just :

• • Dragged the scan of my “real” pen drawing into an Album in iPhoto I’ve dedicated to artwork.
• • Plugged my iPad into the laptop to sync with iTunes.
• • In the iTunes iPad Photo tab I set it to automatically sync all images from my iPhoto artwork album every time I connect my iPad. (Note : the Sketchbook Pro app has the ability to “Add” images to itself from iTunes, I just didn’t find it worked. The “Send To” button DID work however, which is how I later got the PSD file out of iTunes)
• • Once the sync was done, just opened up Sketchbook Pro and clicked on “Open Image” icon to access my photos on the iPad, and found the album titled “artwork” and found my sketch.
• • From there I found it similar to working in Photoshop, in that you have layers to work with (and can set the opacity of, or adjust to multiply or screen), a myriad of drawing tools. I found I kept wanting to do more (like cut, paste, use the magic wand…) to finish up the illustration, but found the drawing experience itself very enjoyable. Especially zooming in and moving around the image, felt much more intuitive than using keyboard shortcuts and a digital pen.  Felt a bit like finger painting… without the mess :)
• • Once I was all finished with the colouring, I was able to “Export Layered PSD to iTunes,” and from there send it to my desktop.

So far, I really like Sketchbook Pro. My only complaint is the small canvas size (1024×682 at 72dpi)… would love to be able to work on actual hi-res sketches. For any illustrators using an ipad, it’s well worth the spare change! I’m waiting to hear from my brother with his experience using a touch screen stylus in conjunction with this program… if it’s good I might buy one as well!

Has been a while since I’ve done some illustrations for my Diary of Hera’s Stuff… was feeling like doing something creative for myself after being off sick with morning sickness, having a couple projects keep me busy (greeting cards & cheese packaging, which I’ll share once the packaging is launched!), and surviving cold & flu season! Anyway, with Aussie winter coming to an end I’m putting away clothes that don’t fit our growing girl… here’s one of the outfits I drew, was a cute little knitted sweater picked up second hand knitted by some other little girl’s grandma.

I just finished this illustration for my diary of Hera’s stuff, and thought I’d share the simple technique I use for colouring pen illustrations in Photoshop. Clicking on the images below will bring up a close-up image.

Step 1 | Open the scan of your drawing in Photoshop, and create two new layers below it. One will be your background colour (I’ve used white here), and the other will be for painting in the colours of your drawing.

Step 2 | Adjust the brightness and contrast until the paper is as white as possible.

Step 3 | Select the background of the sketch with the magic wand tool, and delete it. Make sure all little bits of paper speckle are removed so the colour comes out nice and clean.

Step 4 | Set the drawing layer to Multiply. This will allow the colours below to show through your drawing, and make the pen work come out nice and dark as it multiplies over the colours below.

Step 5 | Use the magic wand tool to select the background of the sketch. Then invert the selection so that you have only the drawing selected. Feather the edges of the selection (Menu Bar > Select > Feather.) Click on the blank layer below the sketch (multiply) layer and fill the entire sketch with a predominant colour.

Step 6 | From here in, apply colour to this colouring layer whichever way you feel comfortable. Applying colour on its own layer(s) makes it easy to adjust the colours later while keeping your drawing in its original condition.I use a combination of the paintbrush and the magic wand / lassoo tools to select areas from the sketch and fill with colour. You can experiment and go as elaborate as you want with colour, shade and textures.

Here’s another illustration of a cute dress that sadly Hera’s grown too tall to wear, now part of my diary of Hera’s stuff. Ink with digital colour.