I said yesterday that I usually have to force myself to stop working on an illustration otherwise I run the risk of noodling at it until I’ve messed it up. One of the dangers of working on art in Photoshop is that you can noodling on the piece in even greater detail and far longer than you can a piece on paper or canvas. With all the layers and the ability to undo the things you don’t like you spend hours on some fussy bit, decide you don’t like it, delete it and then spend a few more hours fussing at it differently. Because I know how easily I can get caught doing that I try to finish the majority of my illustrations before I scan them into the computer. I want to use Photoshop as sparingly as possible.

For this piece I used the program to bump up the color and to add some highlights that I didn’t manage to do on the original. I like the more vibrant (garish) colors but I’m not sure that this is actually an improvement over the original painting.

I finished this painting recently. It had been a few weeks since I participated in the Watercolor Course and I wanted to see what I could do without the time limit imposed by being in class. It took a couple of weeks to do from start to finish – mostly because I could only work on it a bit at a time. Unless the effect you’re going for is a big smeary mess you need to wait for the paints to dry between layers. So I’d get ten or twenty minutes of painting in each day until I finally decided I should stop. I’m a big noodler when I’m doing art so I generally have to decide that I’ve done enough at some point and walk away. I’ve learned that I can mess up a piece with too much noodling.

I like this piece more now than when I did it in class. At the time I was trying for a different result than what I got. Now that it’s been a couple of months I can appreciate the image that I ended up with.