Digital sketching and coloring (collaboration with Julia)

I have been out of my usual orbit the past week, mostly associated with the fact that I had my driving test yesterday and needed to cram review the two driver's guidebook during the weekend. I am glad to say that I have passed the test and now have my Canadian drivers license. Yay! So now, after a day of decompressing, I'm slowly able to get back to my weekly routine.

I haven't got much to show but I'll share what I've just done today anyway. This is in collaboration with my 8 year old (Julia). Last week she made quick sketches of knights that blew me away. I don't know where she got the idea but she came out of her room with her drawing (below) and I just swooned over it. She had accurately depicted the knight's movements, the action, and impression with just a few quick lines. Her drawings were very fluid and simple. It amazed me how children could boil down the complicated details that adults sweat over most of the time into it's simplest forms and still retain the accuracy of the character they are portraying.

Julia's knight pencil sketches

Since I needed to practice doing digital sketches using the tablet pen anyway, I thought it would be a good idea to see how it'd turn out if I traced her sketches over in photoshop and do some quick coloring. In my earlier digital drawings, I have never traced a pencil sketch. I let the pencil lines show through the artwork. So it'd be good to get some practice making purely digital outlines. 

It took me sometime to tinker with the digital brush. I wanted a brush which is sensitive to the pressure and one that would "grow" wider if I put in more pressure and contract to a thin line at very little pressure. Also, I wanted the brush to have an angular edge and not rounded. I must have spent more time tweaking to get the right brush type that I wanted than on tracing and coloring the sketch itself. But I think, it is well worth the effort. 

Below is the resulting sketch. I wanted to keep it rough and sketchy, coloring outside the lines and finishing it pretty fast. I felt that in my previous illustration, I have been too calculated with my sketching and coloring that I wanted to do quick sketches like these for the sole purpose of loosening myself up. I wanted it to have a "cartoony" feel, like it's done by a kid instead of an adult (because the pencil sketch was done by a kid :). All in all, it was a good digital sketch exercise, quite fun to do in a span of thirty minutes. Next time, I would like to explore adding in more textures though. This one feels too 2 dimensional for me. Having some textures underneath would make it more interesting.

I'm still undecided on whether having the pencil outline is better than the digital brush outline or not.

It seems I like both. 

Digital sketch and color study of Julia's drawing