Happy Thanksgiving!!!

Good Afternoon, I hope you are enjoying your Thanksgiving day with your friends and family. I am sure I will be stuffed with turkey, and hopefully asleep by the time you read this...  

God bless the retail system in America! It provides us with jobs, friends, and countless fire code violations on Black Friday, errr Thursday. To those of you who go and shop before it officially strikes Friday... SHAME ON YOU! Also... HELLO! Because I will be seeing you from the other side of the cash register, luckily, not until 1 a.m. though, if you can call that luck? END RANT. Now on to the fun stuff.  

I made this for you and only you!  Kinda. It was good practice for me, too. I did some hand-lettering and some hand-painting. Hopefully that's not too punny for you.  Seriously, thank you for your support, well-wishes, comments, and emails; it really does mean a lot to me and I'm thankful that YOU ALL are in my life :)

It's come to my attention that this breed of turkey is usually made by tracing a hand. Well, that is not the case here. My turkey is special, it's hand-drawn with no tracing help at all! (I should hope that after  $30k in tuition, I would know how to draw a hand. Thank you Illustration Dept. at Hartford Art School)  I held my left hand out in front of me and sketched with my right hand. Here's how I did the rest:

I started by drawing normal block letters along 4 guide lines. I added the extra triangles afterwards, not knowing how they would fit on each letter until I tried.

So I painted in the lettering with a maroon color. I tested some blue to the first "T" and liked how it looked so I continued with that below.

 I also added some to the lettering. The splotches, by the way, are caused by my palm touching the screen before the stylus (pen) is close enough to be registered by the computer. Otherwise, I can rest my palm there if need be.

Here is a failed attempt at making a nice watercolor-like background. I have a lot to learn when it comes to digital painting. I ended up setting the Layer to Difference which somehow made my colors opposite of what I actually chose. So if I chose blue it ended up being yellow (almost complementary, but not always) and vice-versa. Needless to say, it was a little annoying but it gave the right watercolor look to the painting.d

I spent a lot of time painting around the letters on the Difference layer and then ended up accidentally moving the layer. I liked how it looked so I decided to keep it. (I also had already saved and did not feel like going back to a previous save to do it again.) Anyways, thats why you can see an empty outline of the lettering and turkey. I liked it, what do you think?

Before I forget, the program I am using is ArtRage 4. I am using a watercolor brush on watercolor paper. Thanks again for being here and have a wonderful turkey day!