Illustration Friday: Shy
This week’s Illustration Friday topic is ‘Shy’. I knew immediately that I needed draw a shy child – that’s the association in my head, even though I can be pretty shy myself and I’m almost 40! I thought at first about a child hiding behind their hands or behind an arm, but then I had a couple of situations over the last week where each of my daughters was clinging to my skirt, because they were feeling wary and shy in a new situation. So it had to be a child hiding behind their mother’s skirt.
I did the sketch in pencil.
Then I scanned it in and painted in some colour in Photoshop. I used a soft round brush, set at either 40px or 20px and with a Flow of 12%, which gave a nice transparency and allowed me to overlay some different colours.
I had meant to do the colour painting on a separate layer, but managed to do it on the base layer, so I took the original sketch again (in a separate file) and used Select>Color Range to delete all the white so that I just had the pencil outlines left. I pasted these in a layer on top of the coloured image and then gave it a colour overlay of black with 25% opacity.
I like the round faces and hands. I think the shy child herself may be a little too lost, although perhaps that is in fact the right effect!
And it’s another diversion from the gouache, though I’ve certainly not abandoned them for good!
