Be my valentine

and a little bird-watching

I’ve often been secretly envious of the illustrators on Instagram who post thoughtful and cute illustrations they made for seemingly every single holiday. The dark side of my head always shrugs and says something like “who has the time for that? I’ve got deadlines!” and then I go ride my bike, or read about the Phillies. I know that if this was important to me, I’d find the time.

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Occasionally, I do find the time. I always make new drawings for Halloween. And I almost always get a clever Christmas thing out. This year I managed to make a Valentine’s card.

And as the first entry in my new “Picture Show” section here on Substack, where I allow myself the permission to merely post drawings without writing 1500 impressive words about them, I’ll just point out that below are two short process videos:

The first one here is me drawing the illustration with pencil on paper. It’s a very soft, very fat, 6B graphite lead to start, followed by various HB, 2B, 6H, and some Blackwings. Lately I’ve been into just diving in to a drawing without tracing or blue lines or anything. I did a couple of small thumbnail sketches with a magic marker (!) on some cheap sketch paper, turned on some Møtrik, and just went into it. Keeps things, ha ha, interesting.

The second one is the coloring in Procreate. The drawing is scanned into Photoshop where I then pull the linework off of the background (there is a trick to this that I just learned last year) and then export it to the iPad, where I clean up some of the linework before all the color happens.

I’ll frame the original drawing for my own valentine and give it to her tomorrow. Shh. Don’t tell her.

Thanks for reading.

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Related: Two years ago I drew an enormous illustration for the Philadelphia Inquirer for Valentines Day. Take a look: