Illustration: Fairies

I wanted to use the Fairy sample I did back in April in my portfolio, and wanted something more illustrative to go with it. As I already had a whole sketched fairy, and had designed the character of the little girl, I came up with something that would use what I'd already done.

Here's a look at my process:

I did a rough sketch on paper to work out where I wanted things:

As I had lots of overlapping characters I then scanned this in so that I could draw each character separately and move them around to get the best effect. At this point my computer decided to completely give up the ghost, so I had to use an old laptop and an old tablet... resulting in less than stellar sketching. =P One of the fairies is lifted directly from my original sketching in April:

I printed that out and used layout paper to draw over the top until I had a sketch I was happy with:

Then I traced it onto watercolour paper, and inked with fineline pens:

Now I could finally break out the watercolours:

When I'd finished painting I took it into Photoshop to add some fairydust.

Winsor & Newton watercolours with Series 7 brushes on Moleskine watercolour paper, Artline Drawing System pens, white acrylic, Adobe Photoshop CS6.

I'm not entirely sure how long it took, being as it was interrupted by one dying computer, one new computer that had to be set up, and one migraine.... probably somewhere in the region of 15 – 20 hours.