My first mistake was that I forgot to scan it when I had the basic drawing down! I inked the stuff I wanted to have a black line around, and penciled the rest. But I got so excited about my purple brush pen that I started before I remembered to scan.

So far so good — This was fun! In fact, it was so much fun, I ran down to the art store and bought a handful of markers in fire colours to continue this effect. I was just going to use watercolour, *sigh*

The scanner made the yellow here look greener than it actually is.

Adding in some oranges. Still looking pretty good.

I was starting to dig the Van Gogh effect I was getting. But I stopped paying attention to the overall effect because I was having toooo much fun!

OK…. not so bad. In fact the background is kind of neat, but eventually I knew I was going to have to do the critters.

My mentor’s demonstration of a very quick computer colouring looked good, so I tried to emulate the colour scheme. This is a lot brighter colours than I would have used, and probably it just doesn’t translate onto paper from the screen. Much adjusting is in order. I felt that the Van Gogh effect was a little too much after I started painting the animals, so I got out the gouache and started flattening out the shadows. I also felt that the markers were a bit flat looking, so I started warming up the dark bits with gouache and transparent watercolour.

This is as far as I’ve gotten tonight. Lots of tweaking of values and hue is going to have to happen to this before I pronounce it worthy. I may just do it over again, but not until I give it as much as I can. I’m tenacious that way. Thank goodness for gouache.