wheel: art for Illustration Friday

The topic for Illustration Friday this week was wheel. When I first read it, I thought it was Whee! I didn't have a ton of time, so I ended up doing a really detailed sketch, a black outline, and a crop of quick color sketch. No finished art in this bunch, but I like the drawing, so I might do another one in the future, or finish the color for this one. I thought people might like to see the process, so I'm posting all three images.

Mice! And Wheels! And ... hey, is that a cat? The original sketch:

The original sketch is a little hard to see, but you can tell that there are wheels everywhere. Or at least I hope you can see all the round circles.

After I scanned it, I re-drew it with black outline. I used thick black lines and didn't worry about fine details because I thought I was going to have time to do more with it before posting. Here's the black layer:

 You can see the line better now, but it's still not finished. I decided to do a small crop and play with color. Normally I don't do this step, but I knew I wouldn't have time to do finished art and wanted to do a quick color study for later.

I cropped the image where the car was to emphasize the wheel theme. Plus I like that there's also a squirrel, a dog, and a mouse reading a book in this part. Hmm. Looks like I forgot to color in the tongue of the mouse on the bottom. If I do final color, I'll make sure to add that in. Here's the color layer:

I've been thinking about wheels a lot lately for a book I'm working on. It was fun to draw them and play with a different set of characters for these sketches.

Tomorrow it's back to the drawing board for the other set of wheel images, but for today, it's all about the mice, and the squirrel, and dog, cat, ants, and birds!

BTW, I almost put a bat into the image, but it didn't work, so there are two birds. Maybe the Illustration Friday topic next week will be bats. We'll find out tomorrow! Until then, the bats are sleeping.

There's more art on my website: http://sruble.com