I think this is the final version. I’ll put it aside for a week and then come back to it once the “Look at the masterpiece I just created!” buzz has faded. Then I should be able to judge it more objectively and see if anything needs to be changed.
In the meantime, there’s nothing to keep all of you from commenting. What do you think? Is there anything that I need to change about this? I haven’t double-checked the colors on my other monitor. Do they look okay or are they too bright? Does anything look awkward? The wrong color? Incorrect shadows? If you notice anything, pleas let me know. It’s digital, so I can still change quite a lot if necessary.
MAGIC for Fun and Profit
Karen B. Jones - Illustrator 
Nice light & shadows and sparkles!
What did you use to create this?
Photoshop CS5 and a graphic tablet. Mostly it was just a standard round brush, nothing fancy. And lots and lots of layers. The sparkles were done with some star-shaped brushes set to scatter and to jitter the size and rotation. The lines were drawn with the path tool. I also used some gradient fades and I had to rasterize the text layer before I could distort it the way I wanted to.
Did that answer your question, or was there a particular bit you were wondering about? I can go into more detail if you want.
looks nice! is it going to be for something?
Yeah. It’s an illustration for the theme of the local SCBWI conference. It’ll be held a few days before Halloween, hence the witches. If it’s chosen, it’ll be used on all the promotional material for the event. It’s mostly a publicity thing. It would be a way to get my work noticed. Even if it doesn’t win, it’ll still make a nice portfolio piece.
Oh! I see one thing I forgot! I missed shading the whites of their eyes. I’ll do that when I come back to it next week. Along with any other details I notice still need work. 🙂
And the cat’s center whisker is underneath the mist when it should be on top of it. I’ll have to bring that layer to the top to fix that.
So much for being the final version. More like WIP 2.0 🙂