I am still working on the artwork for my new Children’s book about the cute little wizard named Gadzookes.  I have now gotten to the part where I am zooming in to look at individual pixels and do some cleaning up…

The picture on top is a close up of the wizard’s face after I did only the outside cleanup. The second one is pretty much done, ready to be stuck in front of a background… I haven’t decided what background to use yet. It might be just some bright color in a swirly pattern… or maybe one of the scans of some of my watercolor paintings of flowers… or one of the scans of that jungle I painted back when I was playing around with a wood burning set my wife bought me. Don’t worry, we will get to that in later posts.

This is the full-sized picture I am working on now… well, one of them. This is when Gdzookes, who is still trying to create a friend for himself with magic, made an identical copy of himself, who ends up being sort of a jerk, and now has to be sent back to the magic world.

It is when you zoom in that you see all the work there is to do… remember, these pictures are scanned from really old, really small, hand-drawn pictures. You can see old pencil marks, and places where the colored pencil covers my ink lines, and places where the lines get too fat or thin…

There he is after a little work. I try to retain as much of the hand-drawn feel and look as I can. If anyone is at all interested, I can go into more detail on the upcoming posts about this, tell you what tools I use and so on… but I won’t if nobody cares.