Dodo Au Go-Go

I wrote a tiny snapshot story  a while ago and did an illustration to go with it. This was the final drawing. It was a surprisingly long journey to get to this final image. This was where I started. A rough sketch of the image in my head, hand-scribbled in a scrapbook with my watercolour brush pens. I got LittleOne's help to add water to the image. (Shout-out to LittleOne for the skill in making the puddle look so reflective!) Time to play in the phone photoshop express app. Do I like the mud splotches? Not sure yet. Let me try without. Actually, let's feel free and experiment. Interesting, but not what I want. Oooh, I remembered I can draw in the photoshop app now. Can I get the sky to be the shade of dark I want? Yes, I think I can. Let me try darkening the figure. Adding more detail to the dogs. While I'm at it, let me get rid of some all the white/uncoloured bits. Make the vineyards more...

I don't remember how the bag came into my possession. Suffice to say it got well played with over the Christmas season, and is now cumpled, tatty and generally, quite the worse for wear. I was trying to decide whether to throw it in the recycling or do something crafty with it before chucking it out. So I decided to try drawing a flower on its crumpled but blank innards. As you do. There was a logic to my madness - which was that I'm not very good at drawing flowers, and doing a doodle inside a hidden and soon-to-be-thrown-out bag is as good a place to practice as any. I grabbed one of my LittleOne's colouring-in pens.  Again, it reduces any expectations and pressure. (I think I've previously mentioned that I have a pretty savage inner critic?) Anyway, I came up with this. Photo taken in the kitchen with as much fluorescent light as I could get into the gift bag with one hand, while holding my phone with the other. Actually, you know what? I thought to mysel...