My process of working: Wolf+Cub2

This is sort of like Part 2 of one of my older illustrations, inspired by the story Lone Wolf and Cub. The premise of it basically starts where the father sits in front of his baby boy (the mother ran off), and places a bouncing ball and a samurai sword next to each other. If the baby boy crawls towards and chooses the ball, his father will leave him there to be found by authorities to live in a foster home or an orphanage. If the boy chooses the sword, he will follow his father on the path of a fugitive samurai. My older illustration can be found in the 2007 Portfolio section.I scan my first ink drawing into photoshop and begin here.I want mountains to recede into the distance, a river runs down in between them. I recompose it into my first drawing, creating a layer mask and using a soft transparent brush tool to 'fade' out parts of it to give the illusion of distance.Here I put a very simple Red to Orange to Green gradient as the background, and apply a red print like texture onto the surface of the whole thing. Black out the characters with a darker color, emphasizing its position in the foreground.I don't really want to lose all the detail in the foreground drawing, so I put in some highlights to give the shapes of the characters some mass.I fill in the river part with a color that strongly resembles the color of urine the morning after a night of drinking. This helps to give the mountains in the background a point of reference for the recede into the distance. This part is very subtle, but I used a brush that looks like 'scratching', and made it rotate and resize randomly depending on how hard I pushed down with my pen. Pink and Yellow. I heart my drawing tablet. I think the piece was still missing something, so I added a cliff to the right side, if you notice at the top the slight hint of a temple-like structure, perhaps a potential destination? I added some green so it wouldn't get lost into the redness of the sky.And there is my finished illustration. This will be available as a very limited edition print in a future exhibit. Details at a later date. In the meantime, be my friend?