Illustration Friday: "Sugary"

This week, Illustration Friday has the perfect topic to let me segue stylishly into showing some of the sugary sketches I've slaved over recently. "Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy" is in the home stretch - I'll be submitting all the finals for proofing next week. It's been a lot of fun doing a more zany comic style, and adding in lots of little visual storylines. I think it's going to be a really fun book, even though it's nearly killed me trying to get everything done. I'm getting tired of being overcommitted - it would be nice to take my time with something for once, instead of having to rush. Anyway, here's the Sugar Plum Fairy in all her Sugar-Frosted Goodness....

This is almost entirely digital - I did the pencil linework in bits and scanned and combined the sections with Photoshop, then did all the coloring with a mix of Photoshop and Painter. For the lollipops etc, I took photos of barley sugars and colored glass marbles, suspended in a clear plastic bag in front of a sunny window. Then I used the photos as the basis for the sweets, doing lots of tweaking the colors with the channel mixer and painting on top of them. Then I ate the sweets. Thankfully, I still had it together enough not to try chewing on any of the marbles.