There comes a time during the dismal dark of winter where you just don’t want to leave the house. Ever. And that’s generally fine, as there’s still plenty to do indoors. Unfortunately if you’re a photographer and you enjoy shooting in natural light {and you have a full-time job…} the creative options get a little sparser when the only time you see the sun is during your lunch break.

Fortunately for me, there’s always a sketchbook or two lying around! Well, more if you count all the ones that aren’t full yet. I have this problem where I like to buy new sketchbooks and then not necessarily use them. I’m working on it…

That said, sometime during mid-January when I felt like it was time to update my about me sort of imagery, I wasn’t really feeling the idea of standing in front of the camera and struggling to contain my awkwardness long enough to get a normal{ish} photo of myself. Instead I figured I could just revisit an older, unpublished photo as a lil drawing. So, I cracked open my brand new TerraSkin sketchbook and was happy to see my drawing muscles hadn’t died.

Part way through the pencil drawing I decided I wanted to try out colouring it digitally. I’m not sure how well rock paper takes ink though, so instead of potentially ruining what I had, I decided to just trace the ink layer on tracing paper and scan that in to the computer.

{left} pencil line drawing {right} inked lines on tracing paper

The tricky part for me with the whole hey let’s colour this thing digitally is that I don’t own a tablet. I Photoshop everything freehand with a mouse {that occasionally has a double clicking issue}. So, basically I’m the most patient person ever. Deal with it.

As it turns out though, I worked on this very sparsely over the winter and generally only when I was over at the boy’s homestead. He does own a tablet. So I had a great time using that for things like the hair, fur, and lashes. I’ve definitely got a lot to learn though, because I had to keep switching back to the mouse method… probably out of sheer stubbornness, but also tablets are kind of annoying to navigate with when you’re not used to them. We both survived each other though, and in the end I got a fun little doodle:

I’ve been using this as my Twitter background for a while now. I’ve tried using it as smaller icons, but unfortunately it looks like crapola when it gets too wee. I don’t even want to know what Facebook will do to it {yikes}. It was fun to make though and saved me some face time with the camera. Plus I got to pretend I’m way cooler than I actually am and gave myself pink hair. And makeup.

Conclusion: good times were had by Al.