World War Toothfairy

I wanted to do a little illustration for a baby-shower gift for a friend of mine. She's from Mexico and at some point we had discussed how in Mexico the tooth fairy is a mouse (!) which is cute or creepy depending on how you look at it.

Either way I thought the tooth fairy fighting Ratoncito Pérez over a tooth would do the trick. Below you'll find the final piece along with some quick process sketches.

Outdoor Mood Lighting

Again, I won't know until all the pieces are fully colored, but I'm thinking I'm going to want some dreamier, sunset tones rather than just the "true hues." Here's an unfinished example with the original:

A Few More Fully Colored Pieces

These are not finished pieces... just the full scans retouched and fully colored to a "true-hue" which mostly means what's blue is blue and what's red is red. Once everything is finished to this degree, I'll go back in and re-color for style and consistency.

Digitized Watercolor

This piece will likely still change as the others get closer to complete, but here's the general direction.

Watercolor pre-retouching

Here's the same illustration as before, but fully colored. The next step is retouching, which will include extensive color correcting. I'm also going to do the line work digitally with my Wacom tablet because I don't like the line quality I'm getting on the paper I chose.

#nofilter, #nothanks

I've decided I'm going to cheat. I started painting my drawings and while I'm getting results I like, I also keep thinking of things I can do digitally to really make these pieces special. So while I'm doing watercolor for each piece, I'm also going to be adjusting color, contrast, lighting, etc. in photoshop. Above is an in progress of the watercolor without any retouching.