For this week’s Illustration Friday I am working on a colored pencil drawing of a shark (IF post to follow soon). I learned a few things while working on this drawing and I want to preserve them here for future reference:

• My scanner (in .jpg mode at least) does not create as accurate a picture as just taking a snapshot of my piece with my iPhone. This presents a small problem as I have very shaky hands, but the scanned image had more blurring than the pic!
• Many of the lessons learned in oil painting class can be applied to colored pencil work. Activate with color. Too much layering can create muddy color. Etc.
• Creating the look of light on a surface underwater is hard and reference photos don’t help as much as you want them to.
• Last and far from least: getting work done is better than aiming for perfect and, as a consequence, not finishing.

Any tips for capturing underwater light patterns without it looking like leopard print? Any tips for scanning or photographing art? Leave me a comment!