Helping Hands

This is an illustration and layout I did for the Nov/Dec issue of Emerald Coast Magazine for an article on volunteerism. The medium is soft pastels with some digital tweaking. I drew the original on 8.5x11 paper and then scanned it at 11x17 so that it could fit over a two page spread.

The original colors were too bright and I wanted a softer, more soothing, more tranquil feel to the piece. So I did some color adjustments in photoshop using hue/saturation and layer blending modes and maybe some other stuff and... I don't really remember what all I did. Maybe next time I'll do screen shots and take notes. But this time I was in a big hurry to get the job done - from concept to print ready - in 8 hours. Before this version there was the original scan that I touched up a bit. It can be difficult to be precise with pastels especially when working on a small scale so after I scanned in the original, I cleaned up some fuzzy lines on the woman and the girl and around some of the hands before I adjusted the color. But I didn't save a copy of the untidy version for comparison. It wasn't *that* messy though. I promise.