Illustration Friday - Soaked

The word for this week's 'Illustration Friday' challenge is "Soaked," an appropriate word for this week considering the number of storms that have passed through where I live. This is a piece that I actually did a few weeks ago as an experiment in using Corel Painter's Liquid Ink and Watercolor brushes. The idea came from something I witnessed on one of the many daily dog walks that I take with my dog, Poppy. One day, after a spring shower, we were out walking and saw a young boy and girl out playing with their umbrellas in the puddle-filled streets. Since it was warm out, they were in shorts and didn't seem to mind getting a little soaked. That afternoon, I created this illustration based on my memory of those two kids playing in the rain.

I started this illustration with a simple digital sketch, using Painter's Colored Pencil brush.

After sketching in the children, I began inking them in and adding some ink splatters to the background.

I continued to add layers of ink and watercolor washes.

Here I've added an overall wash of color to tone down the stark white background that was showing through.

You can see that by this stage, I've changed the color of the ink I used to outline the children. I started off with a brown ink and here I've changed it to black. I also decided to give the umbrellas a white ink outline.

The finished image. For the final step, I softened some of the watercolor edges and lightly erased some areas to give a better feeling of light reflecting off of the puddles.