Illustration Friday - Double

Since I've been sick all of this past week, I still haven't finished the 'Illustration Friday' challenge from July 16th ("Breakfast"), so for this week's challenge, which is the word "Double," I decided to go with something simpler. Simpler in subject matter, simpler in style. Because it's been so hot here (not to mention the fact that I had a low fever all week), I've been thinking of ways to cool off. When we were in Madison, WI a few weeks back we stopped in at the University of Wisconsin's student union (more than once) to have some of the delicious ice cream served up by their ice cream stand, The Daily Scoop. They were very generous with their servings, and though I always asked for a single scoop, they always gave me a double scoop. So, with ice cream on my mind, I decided to do an image of two friends, who while out walking their dogs, decided to pop into the ice cream parlor and get a double scooped cone.

In the first sketch I made, I had the two girls standing side by side and looking straight ahead. But then I decided upon the Ice Cream Parlor scene and decided it might be better if I showed them sitting across from one another. This way I could put a little perspective on the scene and show what was going on outside the shop window.

Here is my second sketch where you can see how I changed their positioning. After adding this sketch as a separate layer in my Painter document, I then sketched in the rest of their bodies and the background.

At first I thought I would outline the drawing using one of Painter's sketchy pen brushes, but for some reason I didn't like the quality of the line and I thought I was starting to lose some of the vitality of the original pencil sketch. In this image, you can see how I've started to ink in the figure on the left. In the end I decided to add a new layer with a cleaned up pencil sketch and in addition, I allowed the layer containing the original sketch to partially show through.

In case you're wondering how I did the backwards lettering on the window - I set the type up in Adobe Illustrator and put it along a curved line.  I then exported that file as a tiff file and opened it up in Photoshop.  In Photoshop I flipped it and gave it some perspective. I then saved it again as a tiff file and placed it on a separate layer in my Painter document. From there, on a new layer, it was easy to trace over it with Painter digital watercolor brush.

Here is the original text created in Illustrator and saved as a tiff file.



Here it is after I flipped it and gave it some perspective in Photoshop. I then used this as a separate layer in my Painter image to guide me in painting the lettering on the window.