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    Yesterday, I showed you how I’d been illustrating winning stories from the Welsh Books Council Dahlightful schools writing competition See yesterdays video here:

    Today, in part 3, I’m showing you how I illustrated a story by Finnuala Buckley from Bishop Headley High School.

    The illustration required me to draw a portal in the ice. I wanted to create a Time Ripple” effect and decided the best way was use photoshop to add the effect on after I’d painted the picture.

    First I cut out the drawing of the library, that you can see through the hole in the ice, and then I placed it in the layer below, so it appears “through” the hole, and distorted the library image a bit.

    Then I created a ripple effect on another layer in-between and tweaked the transparency of that layer so you could see the library through it. After that, I added a bit of shadow to add depth, before cropping the image and tidying it up, ready for the printer.

  • It’s mother’s day in the US this weekend. If you are wondering how to make a card are what to draw on it, then click here to go to my playlist of 29 mother’s day drawing idea videos.

    Honestly, mother’s much prefer a hand-drawn card than a store-bought one!

     

  • Yesterday, I showed you how I’d been reading the winning stories from the Welsh Books Council Dahlightful schools writing competition and how I decided how I was going to illustrate each story.

    Today, in part 2, I’ll show you how I go from a rough sketch to a piece of finished artwork.

    This Story, by Catrin Watson-Jones, of Aberconwy High School, tells the story of Nai, who falls into a virtual reality game where he meets Gareki an Ai character who wants to be a real person.

    The two team up against Segatendo, who is making the game impossible for them. If they win, Gareki will become a real person and Nai will have a real friend. I felt that we needed to see Nai wearing his Oculus Rift headset, being zapped by Segatendo, so I did some research on on the headset and based the illustration on a sketch I’d previously drawn in PC World, while watching a kid dancing about in the Vive demonstration area!

    Segatendo is described as a 3 foot tall sprite, with fairy wings and a pair of blue shorts and red shirt. A large gold crown was placed on his messy blonde hair. There’s not much description of the other two, so I decided to make Nai look a little shy and Gareki I felt should look like the cool guy Nai would really like to be friends with.

    In this video I show how I go from sketches to finished sketch to final artwork – oops! There was something I didn’t like about it, so I started again!