Today’s piece comes from a really old sketch that I found and wanted to update digitally. I’ve been doing a lot of this sort of work lately – finding old things that can become finished pieces with a days work and… just doing that! This digital painting of a set of matryoshka doll cats is one of the results.
I wanted to keep this drawing feeling cute and hand-sketched, so I used a textured brush when outlining and adding the little details in the background. The brush I used was a pastel texture, but I think that the effect mimics colored pencils. Either way, this technique was really fun to do digitally.
As usual, I changed the original quite a bit. For instance, I took out the awkward daffodils in the background and replaced the clementine in the original drawing with another, tinier nesting cat. I later added watercolors to this doodle and ended up really not liking it. But since I had scanned this line art already, I had something to start a digital painting with.
My goal with this painting was to come up with an image for small greeting cards, and this was the result after a full day of work. It came out pretty cute and looks super nice on my test prints. I’ll be back later this week with more cute stuff: a mug of tea and a little fish in the sketchbook. See you then!