how I do

I thought it would be interesting to give you all a little behind the scenes look at how I do some of my work. What seemed like the perfect opportunity occurred when I was working on a page I recently completed for my book. I can't show you the whole page, but I've chosen a closeup of the detail of the rug(and kitty coincidently).

First, I work up the final sketch, as follows.

Then I determine what pattern, colors, etc I want to use for each detail. You can see that I decided the rug should be a woven one and sketched in the marks. I also started to play with the colors.

Next, I painted the six different woven rug sections. I had to make them substantially larger than the actual drawing of the rug in order to fit in the detail. Over the acrylic paint I drew the marks with an ultra fine point black Sharpie marker. I then scanned in the painted pieces.

Lastly, I placed the pieces onto the page in Photoshop. I had to manipulate the connecting edges of the straight and curved pieces to give them a seamless appearance. And tada! You have your finished rug.