Process for Teatime

I've been thinking a lot about the process that I go through for creating a piece (in this case, it's going to be a gouache painting); I'm still fairly fluid in this and haven't nailed down a specific method yet, but it goes a little like this:

First I start with an idea. I really, really love tea and was thinking about the phrase "tea adventure". After thumbnailing a few compositional ideas (I initially wanted this to be a landscape piece), I felt that this one worked the best, so I fleshed it out a bit more (this was originally done in red pencil, which I'm really liking at the moment, then scanned in grayscale to further work with.)

Then I move into a value study. Well, I sort of cheat when I'm working digitally and switch back and forth from color to value while I work, so I can tweak things as I go- I do this by placing a layer filled with white on top and setting it to "color" mode- then toggling it on and off.

Here are the various color studies that I went through; these are more fine tweaking, since I already had a pretty good idea of what I wanted to do, but I spent a lot of time waffling with the sky and clouds, since I wanted them to stand off the background a little without distracting from the mice. This is the best part about working in Photoshop- it takes little to no time to change small things.

You might also notice that the last two have a bit more detail than the first two- I wanted to add as much of the detail that I would have in the actual painting, including texture.

Time to get to work! I want to try out cutting the shapes out with film and using various brush and sponge techniques to give my work a little more texture, much like the great Scott Wills, who painted many of the backgrounds for Samurai Jack.

Wish me luck!