Monday, September 1, 2014

Lantern



Two sisters take a magical walk at night. Are those fireflies or something else...?

I made this watercolor painting in monochrome brown, then took it into photoshop for some fun color and lighting effects.

Sunday, May 25, 2014

Sweet Dreams - Underwater Scene

This is officially my first published piece! I just completed this painting for a picture book called "Sweet Dreams" published by Tiger Stripe Publishing.  I am so excited and happy.

Here's the final piece:





And here are a few in progress shots.  Because there's so much detail, I drew everything at 1.5x the final size.  First, I transferred my pencil outlines onto the watercolor paper using a lightbox (I'll post about this process soon). Here are the original pencils before transfer.




I did a light blue-green wash over the background, adding drops of water and dabbing away color to lighten up areas I want to make stand out. I layered the same wash over the castles in the background to give an appearance of distance. I also started painting in the characters.





Filling out the characters and starting the background with wet-in-wet techniques. Behind the queen's shoulder piece, I watered down and dabbed away the background colors so the colors appears to be showing through a white transparent cloth.





Finally, I scanned in the painting into Photoshop. I took 4 scans and stitched them together (another process I'd like to share with you sometime in the near future.  Here's the painting mid-process for color editing in Photoshop. This closely resembles the actual painting. I did further edits to push forward and highlight certain areas, particularly the turtle - he tends to disappear in the mix and I love him too much for that to happen! The effect is subtle but it makes a big difference. If you're curious about how I achieved the final look using photoshop, you can view this post.




The final painting again:



And just for fun, my friends and I exploring Monterey this weekend :)








Friday, May 2, 2014

Thank You Cards - Free Download

My husband recently had a very successful surgery.  Life is feeling wonderful right now thanks to some very skilled doctors at Stanford and a generous donor.

In the spirit of Thanks, I want to share these cards with you - please feel free to download and print them for your own use. Just click the card to download the full resolution version.

Lots of love,
Sarah

http://sarahmccormickdesign.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/Thank You 1.jpg

http://sarahmccormickdesign.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/Thank You 1.jpg

Thursday, March 27, 2014

Efflorescent Vines


Experimenting with dimension in watercolors. They are mostly imaginary, but I was thinking of these lovely little purple pinwheel flowers in front of the office where I work.

Sunday, March 9, 2014

Red Fox

I had a great time painting with a group of friends this weekend. The time flew by. I was excited to try out a few new paints and new techniques!




Saturday, February 15, 2014

Photoshop Tutorial: How to make scanned artwork look more like the Original (featuring a cute little tinker)

Achieving a pristine digital copy of your artwork isn't easy. Scanning artwork is just the first step. (For advice on scanners, you can view my post here.) Even a good scan will look quite dull in comparison to your original vibrant, colorful work.

But don't be discouraged!  Once you have tried these tricks a few times, they'll be like second nature to you. I hope this tutorial is useful for anyone struggling to make their digital copies the best they can be.










Saturday, February 1, 2014

The Ivory Cups

Remember this post? Well, I finally completed the illustration! I had so much fun painting these fairies, from the Irish fairy tale, "The Ivory Cups."