Illustration Friday-Garden Ponds CH 13

Illustration Friday-Garden Ponds CH 13
Originally uploaded by speartoons

I did this illustration for a book nine years ago. It was "The Complete Idiot's Guide to Garden Ponds."

I loved illustrating these books because the chapter title lent themselves to humorous illustrations. These books helped me polish my drawing skills in Adobe Illustrator.

This illustration was originally black with gray scale. But that's the beauty of Adobe Illustrator. It allows you to change color on the fly. That and I can enlarge it without any loss of quality.

The blue sky background was done with Illustrator brushes and a transparency setting. That still looked too sharp, so I applied a Gaussian blur to the sky. I just love the fact you don't have to go into Photoshop to blur something anymore.

This chapter was on the care and maintenance of waterfalls and other water features. The thought of a tiny waterfall got me thinking what kind of animals would be daredevils and try to go over such a feature in a barrel. Naturally, a mouse would just love it.