Couple with Strange Hat

I am trying to be good this holiday week and spending as much time as possible in the studio. (It's not all fun and games: there is some discipline required, you know.) Monday gleaned this decidedly odd couple, a variation on a drawing that I made a few months back (to see that, click here). I love strange old doll proportions, and wondered what it might be like to breathe contemporary life into some. "Contemporary" ended up being clothing and hairstyles from a Schiffer compendium of early 1980's Sear's catalogues. I chose to keep the colours to neutrals + cobalt blue + red. I tend to overdo colour so it's good to be disciplined on that front occasionally -- very much like when I have to stick to a certain palette at work.

Because I decided to include this picture in my online illustration portfolio and shop, I scanned and then cleaned it up. Sometimes I feel as though I am cheating when I play around with my pictures in Photoshop, but at the same time I know that it's something alot of illustrators do. And in this day and age of internet and reproduction, most people will get to see the work in scanned form anyway, so it may as well be clean. Unless of course "unclean" is part of its raison d'etre. In this case, I thought that those spots on and around the man's face above were unnecessary, and I didn't like the way that the white paint 'sat' on his face.

I actually started by cutting the figures right out of the background, which being textured paper was very shadowy and spotty, then I cleaned up some spots and little bits around both of the faces using the stamp tool. Faces I find really important: if they look wrong then it's all over as far as I'm concerned.

...If you have an opinion on all of this, let me know!