Dear Readers,

The world is covered in snow but in the studio I’m singin’ about colors…

Living Canvas is all about me embracing all sides of my creativity, letting one project inspire the next in whatever medium that calls to me. I let my new rainbow quilt, which you can see in more detail here, be my inspiration for an illustration. I started, like I usually do, by sketching on my iPad in procreate.

My rainbow quilt makes me so happy, it just tickles me when I seeing all the colors lay around the house. I wanted to create a piece that was about hope - something we all need right now, that I could share on the web to lift spirits. One of my first concept sketches is shown below. I thought drawing my quilt waving in the wind while a young character holds it running would tell my story…

But this type of carefree, bright day wasn’t connecting with me. Collectively we are “hanging in there,” many of us in the midst of the darkest part of their lives. I sketched more until I realized this required a portrait, a face that says, it’s going to be alright. And she splashed out of my pen…

Everything felt right, I went to final, enlarging the drawing onto to some vellum. Colored pencils take a lot of a layers, so I like to lay down a layer of air brush with a copic marker airbrush attachment (Kindly gifted to me from Copic.) In bolder areas, I put marker directly onto the vellum.

Then I build up the colored pencils, moving a small circular motion. Each area has about 9-12 layers of color. It has been some time since I’ve done a full colored pencil piece. I found these pencils in the bottom of the barrel chewed my family dog, I couldn’t part with them… I’m guessing they are from around 2009. Anyone else’s dog just LOVE prisma colored pencils?

I fell into a rhythm of blending colors and sharpening pencils.

When I finished, I scanned the drawing into my computer and added text. Hold on everyone, we will get through this. I really believe that.