Back in October Daniel would go around the house saying “I love owls, and owls love me.”  I thought it was really cute and decided to paint an owl for him.  I got this far:

Then made the mistake of asking Daniel if he liked it.  He said, “No.  It’s too scary.”  So I never finished it.  Still, I thought it was kind of fun so I decided to post it anyway.  My poor little unfinished owl with no feet 🙂

Here’s a sneak peek of a new project I’m working on that Daniel DOES like (although he has recently decided the dragon ought to be blue):

The photo of Daniel is just a placeholder, I’ll use it as reference to paint him in later, once everything else is right.

I had fun experimenting with a new Photoshop technique as I worked on these card characters.

I scanned my pen drawing and after adjusting the levels to get rid of background noise from the scan I set the pen layer’s blending mode to “multiply.” 

Then I painted each object a solid color on it’s own layer.  This allowed m to use the hue/saturation slider to easily play around with color schemes. 

After I had the right colors I created a layer for the shadows  by painting the shadow areas with a single dark color and setting the layer’s blending mode to “color burn.”  If your image has a white background this blending mode works extra well because the shadow color will disappear on white, which means you don’t even have to stay in the lines!

I created the highlight layer by painting the light areas with a single light (almost white) color, and setting the blending mode to “soft light.”

Add a few little details here and there and viola! it’s finished!  This is SUCH an easy method for quick digital art.  I should have tried it out ages ago.