Embrace

I posted this painting last week in a series of pictures, but I wanted to give you a little more of her story. This is a concept for a page in the book I've written. I'm currently shopping for a publisher who's willing to take on this little project of mine, and in the meantime, I'm trying to paint a few more final illustrations.

What I'm sending out is a dummy book of my story which is a mock up of what I envision the words and pictures to look like published. The dummy book isn't a full color print out of final illustrations, but rather a small black and white book of detailed sketches. I've completed several of the final illustrations from my sketches, but I don't want to complete all of them yet because if it does get picked up, the book might end up going through a lot more changes. That being said, this illustration is one that's already gone through a metamorphosis. It started out looking like this:

I liked the close up of the mom here, but the scan was bad, and I thought it needed a bit of photoshop magic, so it became this:

[Just to note: The huge blank side of the page houses the text.] 

I liked this enhanced version, but I started to wish I could see the baby's face. I also wanted to soften the mother's appearance a bit. That lead to this sketch:

Which lead to the final:

I create my backgrounds and page elements separately, and put them together later, not in photoshop, but with glue, or tape. This way of making my illustrations came about as a fluke, which I'll tell you about in a different post, but it's been a time and sanity saver. It also creates a neat dimensional effect with the shadows. 

I'm not sure if she's completely finished, but she's mostly there.

xo

nessa dee