Drawing fabric folds: a practice run

Sophie's birthday is round the corner, so her Godma decided to make a card to go with the bag of goodies. Godma figured she needed the practice and challenge of rendering fur and fabric. One can do only so many pages of coloring books drawn by other people!

I copied the drawing of a dreamy-looking mouse from a Pinterest post I saw, but the post was in black and white, so the color choices of the animal and clothing are mine. I used the black and white picture - and all its shades of grey - as reference for the subtle shades of the folds in the blue-denim overalls, red undershirt and yellow scarf.

I used my Derwent periwinkle blue and my lighter Prismacolor powder blue, as well as a 70% cool grey for darker areas of the denim. White was used on the tops of the folds catching the light, accented by ink from my white gel pen. The red shirt was done with a combo of poppy red (base color), Tuscan red and two shades of orange.

I also tried to make the mouse look furry. This entailed putting down a base color of light brown and then overlaying it with light strokes of darker brown and warm grey.

Godma is not entirely satisfied; this could have been better. Surely the way denim catches the light and the way cotton (I presume the red shirt to be cotton!) does it are different? This was all done only by observation and instinct. My copy of Colored Pencil Painting Bible arrived last week, but haven't had a chance to browse through it or use it for reference.

The lettering was hand-drawn and colored in with my Towbow Dual-Brush Pens.   I don't feel confident enough yet to hand-write using the pens, showing the characteristic thick-thin strokes of brush lettering.

Sigh, so many things to learn, so little time. Work always gets in the way. I still haven't tried out my Derwent Water Color Pencils!!