Way back in high school I had a Commercial Art project to illustrate a nursery rhyme. I chose to illustrate Sing a Song of Sixpence and it turned out really well. My teacher even went out of his way to compliment me on it, which didn’t generally happen because he was more of a fine arts sort of person. Cartoon work was beneath his notice.
Anyway, for several reasons that I won’t go into here, those illustrations never made it home with me and I always regretted losing them a little. So, about a year ago, I re-did them from memory. It wasn’t exactly the same work, of course. But I remembered the unique elements of layout and style that made that first version work so well.
The new version was composed of two line drawing in black ink colored with colored pencils. I liked it really well when I first created it. However, as time went on, I liked it less and less. The line drawings were great. It was the coloring I didn’t like.
So, this week I redid the image once again. I had a version of the line drawings from before I colored them, so I opened up Photoshop and started from there. I just put the finished version up on my website. This version is the best one yet.
Karen B. Jones - Illustrator 