Mother's Day! (Non-Project Art)

Hey there folks, it's Mother's Day! So go call your mom and tell her how much you appreciate her. Right now.

Okay, so I admit there's more to this post than that. My parents always appreciate art from me as a gift, so I usually draw the card myself. Usually it's just a drawing of something or other, but since I've been doing all the human practice lately thanks to AotP, I figured I'd go one step further than usual: I'd draw my mom. I decided this at 3am. And mom had mentioned before that artists seem to have a problem rendering her. As such, come this morning I was pretty worried about the image, but it turned out great actually.

This is a piss-poor photo of the card. Seriously, the card looks better than this, it was my photographing skills that sucked. W/e. I kinda recommend viewing the full image by clicking it, but it's kinda huge, I didn't mess with it at all. Anyway, so I make this card, and I decide: "You know what? I'm pretty proud of this, so let's do some digital painting work to try to give it some color and make it look nice."

Now I've gone and messed with it. I used a despeckling filter in gimp after de-saturating it to zap away really harsh lines that would hurt my digital process. As-is, this could be submitted as a pretty sketch-like image and be satisfying. But that wasn't where I wanted to stop. Full view is a bit safer on this one.

And here's the final. I'm VERY satisfied. I wanted it to keep some of the sketchy quality, but I wanted it to have color and for some of the shading to return from the despeckle. So here it is. Thanks mom, and happy Mother's Day! And cheers to all of you other folk, enjoy the day.

PS In case you saw it and were very eager for it, I will NOT be going to see Dark Shadows today like we thought, it's just too late and folks are tired so we'll be going later this week, likely Wednesday. Sorry.