Sketches

TALL TAIL...
	This idea came complete...very little was changed from this rough to the final artwork. Click on any illustration for an enlargement.
The full sized sketch lifted intact from the thumbnail sketch.
	The drawing was almost a tracing of the sketch above...very little was changed.
The watercolor dye step. The only major change was that the (what was a black bear) cub became a polar bear cub. The black bear cub got lost in the design, being so small and all, so I made him a polar bear, and he popped.
	Quite a surprise here. After finishing the colored pencil stage, I always spray the artwork with an acrylic spray called "Workable Fixative." I do this for two reasons: (a) It prevents the pencil color from undergoing what's known as "wax bloom," which describes the wax in the pencil color rising to the surface, resulting in a cloudy effect. This can be removed by buffing, but the spray keeps this from happening; and (b), the second reason, is to allow the waxy pencil color to accept the acrylic paint of the final step. I've been doing this for years, and I've never had the spray react with the pencil, this time causing something to turn a magenta red. There were many layers of color, so I'm not sure why, but, luckily, it didn't cause much more work. I thought the final step would take about 3 seconds to do since the pencil colors I had were pretty close to what I wanted. Not in the end, though.
The final product. The color was back to approximately what I had in the colored pencil stage before the spray debacle.
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