Illustration Friday - Rescue

Final image

This week's 'Illustration Friday' challenge is the word "Rescue," and I am submitting a piece that I actually created three years ago. It was a piece I did for fun, my attempt at creating an image that looked like it might have come from a Little Golden Book.

I always loved the Richard Scarry books and his illustrations showing towns populated entirely by animals. In my illustration, an elephant is being rescued by a squad of dalmatian firemen.

Before I began painting (the final image was created in Painter 11), I created a few thumbnail pen and ink sketches in one of my sketchbooks.

You can see in the first rough sketch that I originally had quite a different look for the dog climbing the ladder. I didn't like his snout, so I changed it to a more boxy shape.

       

Once I was happy with my character designs, I created a cleaned up sketch. From there, I began filling in blocks of color, using Painter 11's chalk and pastel brushes.

Cleaned up sketch created in Painter 11

Starting to fill in areas of color

For the final stepped, I gave the elephant a warmer tone and some reflected light from the flames. This helped her to stand out more from the gray building.