After a winter of writing and re-learning how to knit, I am back to drawing. My interests wax and wane, and definitely turn to other things in the fall and winter. It takes about a week after Christmas for me to be truly sick of winter, and so now I’m working on something springy.

A painted turtle with a toad on top of him with a butterfly on him. First it was just a toad on a turtle, but I added a butterfly halfway through. Here it was a week ago:

The background was lacking. In the reference photo, the pond behind the creatures is gross green. I tried to add some brighter colors but it still looked blech.

This is why I love Stonehenge paper. It takes abuse well. I tried adding some grass to the foreground and didn’t like that, either. So a couple erasers later I had this:

Doesn’t look too much different, except you can see the original top of the drawing better. I erased into the butterfly, toad and turtle so that the end result would blend better.

This is where Photoshop is invaluable. I first tried to colorize the background to see what I liked better. Some more reds helped, but I messed with the background so much it looked pretty messy. Finally I decided it needed to look more like water. A section of photo behind the animals gave me a much better idea of what I wanted to do. So here it is today:

 

And soon it will be finished. Thanks to Stonehenge for being so flexible and for Luminance pencils for being willing to cover most anything.