Adelaide: Refinished

It's good to revisit old works, time and again. I underwent such a project recently, the painting a 5 year old college project that was leaving many things to be desired. Thankfully, I was able to renew at least a small portion of it! 

The original is a far more complex piece, in watercolor and acrylic. Retouching/repainting was done in Photoshop CS3 with a Wacom Bamboo tablet.

Personal Novel Project: Now With Color!

I posted the original pencil sketch of this several months back, and decided to revisit it recently with some digital color. This was the end result, which I think turned out pretty well. I think my current digital method really benefits from having traditional materials as a large part of the finished piece, in this case, somewhat rendered pencils. I like that raw texture to come through in the original, as it gives the painting a more honest and tactile feel than say, a fully polished digital painting. But that's just my humble opinion.

As for Adelaide, our young heroine, she'll be quite alright after she gets over her fright. Lucky doesn't even begin to cover it!

Characters, creature concepts, and art © April Schumacher.

Personal Novel Project: Some Snippets

It's been entirely too long since my last post. I hope to rectify that by posting more on works in progress during the next few months, provided I have anything new/of interest to show.  For now, I'll make do by showing a few of the sketches and concepts I've been doing for my (likely) lifelong personal project, an illustrated short novel. I wish I had more time to write these days, but alas! No go.

The last image is one of the few digital experiments I've done. I just don't find the medium as satisfying as traditional, but we'll see if that doesn't change in the future.