Heron

Source:
Your standard, "omg, it's a heron! where's my camera, where is it?! Shoot, I gotta change the batteries! It's going to fly away ... ahhhhh!" animal picture.

Lessons Learned:
I wanted to experiment painting under a very fine-lined drawing. I realized that even if I erase the heck out of my drawings, (unless I draw super big, which I don't like to do) even fine pencil lines look too thick when scanned. So instead I redrew the lines in Photoshop. At first I tried a stylized line style with varying thickness, but it looked too thick. So instead of really erased and erased until I had very very fine lines, maybe only about 1-2 pixels thick. And then I painted. I'm not so impressed with the result ... I think I'll try it again at a later time.

What I actually like is the water, which I never intended to do. All of it was done as a patchwork of short horizontal strokes (tough on hands!). First, I added really dark, blackish stokes in random places in the shadow of the heron. I used a zig-zag path of stokes to make the shadow of the thin legs. The legs are so thin the shadow looks better broken up by the water. Then I filled out the rest of the shadow with more brownish stokes. I filled in the rest of the water by gradually increasing (about 3 times) the whiteness of the blue base, and then making short, long ^ shapes. I made on side of each ^ consistently lighter than the other side to give it some depth. Finally I tied some of the ^s together by going over them with a very whitish blue and a very light touch.