Monday, August 31, 2015

On with the Snow!

cover


 Snow comes very early here. But that's a normal climate change in Illustrationville. Last week it was really good packing snow. I was fortunate again to illustrate a cover for Hal Leonard's music students' magazine. For this piece I used traditional media: pastels and colored pencil on mi-tientes paper, with only a small bit of photoshop for cleaning and color adjustments. White pastel works well to capture the effect of snow as long one is lucky in choosing the color of the paper.  I have a drawer full of unused and partially used pastel paper and often go through it several times, testing the pastels on small swatches before settling on a color. The title was hand lettered on a separate layer. The sketch took part of a day, the finished art another day (and some of the night).  "There's no business like snow business....."

detail

 dog