The Fairy Band

This is a drawing I did last week in an attempt to continue building a portfolio for illustrating children's books. I later painted it with watercolors, but was unhappy with that work. The pen and ink went better though.

I used Paint Tool Sai entirely for this portion of the exercise. Went for a fast and loose drawing style- particularly so on the fairies. Give it a click if you want to see it at a larger resolution. Open it in another window instead if you want to view it at it's largest.

One issue I ran into was that I was simply working at too high a zoom level. There's a lot of juicy textural stuff going on with the pen and ink work here, and it's definitely lost at print/screen size. Next time, I'm going to need to work with a large pen tool, and just attack it with what is comparatively a blunt object. The detail is great, but if you lose that sense of reality that comes from texture, what's the point? Here's a close up to give you an example. As always, click for closeup.