Illustration Friday - Early

The word for this week's Illustration Friday challenge was 'Early.'  Even before I read this week's word, I had been thinking of doing another piece using the female elephant character that I created for the "Rescue" and "Dip" challenges.  My first idea for 'early' was to have the elephant in bed, stretching and yawning as her alarm clock goes off, but I began to feel that was too obvious a choice.  So, instead, I decided to have her doing something that I've been doing recently - getting up early and going for a walk in a park. There are few people in our neighborhood park before 8 a.m., usually just a few dog walkers and maybe a jogger or two. It's a good time of day to see lots of birds, squirrels and rabbits. But best of all is the early morning sun coming through the clouds. This is something I wanted to try and capture in this piece - the early morning light.

The reason that I decided to do the image in a circular format is because I recently went to a presentation of late nineteenth and early twentieth century magic lantern slides. These slides were a form of entertainment before the movies really took off and often they were created in a circular format.  Watching these images from over a hundred years ago, I was inspired to try and create a circular composition.

Above you'll see my pencil sketch and a work in progress image where I've blocked in some of the colors and started adding some details.  The image was painted in Corel Painter 11.  I'm really happy with the way that the clouds turned out. I created them on a separate layer, above the sky layer. Their colors were first blocked in with the gouache brushes, then I added some shading to them using the Real Soft Chalk brush.  I followed that with some blending using a Soft Blender Stump brush. I then ran the Soft Blender Stump across the sky to add some rays of sun. In my final image, I left the pencil sketch layer on, but lowered the opacity.  If you look carefully (click to enlarge the images) you can see the faint pencil lines.