The Panda Adventure -- A Process Post

"I think I will embark upon an adventure today."

Today, I would like to share a little "behind-the-scene" –– my work process.


Initially, what I had in mind was a postcard promo.  I thought drawing cute pandas would be, well, CUTE.  This was what I drafted.

And I brought it in color.

Except I had a few problems with the piece.  (1) The panda's eyes completely disappeared within the dark circles.  (2) The paper was too rough.  The scan picked up a texture I disliked. (3) The composition was flat.

But the biggestt problem of all: there was NO STORY TO THE PIECE.  These pandas were doing nothing other than being cute.

To make things work, I decided to revamp it.  I no longer needed it to be in postcard dimension, so I explore what I like to do best – making compositions for picture book's dimension.

First of all, I wanted to get the pandas right.  I did some panda sketches.

Followed by composition studies.

I know... My notes are all over the place.

With a direction, I pencil sketched loosely on the watercolor paper and started working on the piece.

I was REALLY tempted to change the scene to a forest and made them brown bears, but I overcame that thought and continued on with the pandas.

Color us differently, and we'll be a different bear.

And the final piece was done, as shown at the top of this post.

One more thing: Remember how I wanted to color them in as bears instead of pandas?  I ended up doing a quick one on a small piece of paper.  Turns out I liked it, so I might explore not using the black brush pen for a future piece.

That's my process of the week!  Hope you enjoyed the post. :)