I was sketching a mouse one day and decided it would be interesting to have it holding a clover blossom. In the process I decided to make the mouse female, and have her sort of coyly holding the clover, possibly in an alluring way. Here is that initial sketch:
I eventually redrew this pose, and decided to make her more shy than coy. I changed her pose, I hid her face behind the clover blossom a little, and changed her tail. I also added a patch of clover as a little bit of a background:
In the final inks, I made her ears a little rounder. During the watercoloring process, I tried to add some gradual color gradients on the clover, shifting from a yellowish green at the top to a bluish green toward the bottom. I’m really pleased with the resulting effect on the clover. Thanks for reading!
I decided his back foot that I’d drawn in the air to show he was running looked weird, and redrew it on the ground instead. This made it look like he was walking instead of running, so I decided that he was setting off on an adventure, a concept I liked a lot better than the idea of him running away. I also drew in some rocks and grass to help explain the placement of his feet:
I then proceeded to mess up 2 attempts to ink this drawing due to the fairly light nature of my penciled drawing. I usually tape a piece of watercolor paper over top of my final penciled drawing and using a light table I trace my penciled lines onto the watercolor paper in ink, being careful to keep the lines pretty fine so that they don’t overpower the colors when I add them. In this case, I couldn’t see the mouse’s expression very clearly though the watercolor paper, so I messed up on his face twice. The first time, I finished inking the rest of the image after I had messed up so that I’d have something to practice on when it came time to add colors. On my third inking attempt I darkened the scanned lines in Photoshop and printed them out, making it easier to see his face through the watercolor paper. Here are those ink lines:
I was glad I had a version of this drawing to practice coloring because I messed up the colors the first time around, and I was able to solve those problems before coloring my good inked lines. There are few things more frustrating to me as an artist than messing up a nicely inked image and having to ink a new version all over again. Later on, I decided that I didn’t like the upper whiskers, and erased them in Photoshop. Well, that’s the story of this adventuring mouse. Thanks for reading!