Illustration Friday - Journey

I've been busy working on an illustration homework assignment for a conference I'm attending in a couple of weeks, so I didn't have time to create a new illustration for this week's 'Illustration Friday' word challenge, which this week is "Journey." So, instead, I went through my portfolio and found this image which I did last year. A little gray rabbit is starting out on a journey in a hot air balloon, I think it fits the theme quite well. As you might be able to tell, I've been heavily influenced by children's book illustrators like Garth Williams and Richard Scarry.  My image was digitally painted in Corel Painter using various brushes, primarily the gouache and chalk brushes.

Illustration Friday - Bottled

It's been a few weeks since I've had time to work on an Illustration Friday challenge, but now that the Handmade Market that I was preparing for is over, I've got a little more time. This week's challenge is the word 'Bottled,' and the first thing that came to my mind when I read it, was the bottled city of Kandor from the silver age 'Superman' comics. For those of you who have not kept up on Superman lore, Kandor was a kryptonian city that was reduced to miniature size and placed in a large bottle by the space villain, Brainiac. Superman kept the city and its bottled inhabitants in his Fortress of Solitude in the Arctic. He made a vow to himself that one day he would find a way to enlarge it and its miniaturized inhabitants back to their normal size. I was a big Superman fan back in the mid sixties when I was a pre-teen, and to this day I still enjoy reading stories from that era. I haven't read Superman regularly for years, but from what I've read in The Essential Superman Encylopedia, by Robert Greenberger and Martin Pasko, the city was finally restored to normal size sometime in the late seventies or early eighties.

So my illustration this week is my tribute to the bottle city of Kandor. I created the image using both Corel Painter and Adobe Photoshop. I did all of the preliminary work in Painter and then used Photoshop to apply a 'Mister Retro' filter that gave it the look of a vintage printed graphic.  I hope you enjoy it.

Below is the original digital watercolor that I created in Painter, before I applied the text and the Photoshop filters.