I usually doodle into a small moleskine journal that sits beside me and gets picked up whenever I have to wait for something to happen, such as when I'm uploading large images to one of my stores. I've been flipping through its pages recently, and found this tree silhouette, so of course decided to see if I could take it a bit beyond its scribbly confines to and use it on cards or gifts somewhere somehow ... Here's the original sketch, warts and all:
And here are some of the steps I worked on. First I 're-painted' the background digitally so it wouldn't look so marker-pen-ish:
I then had the brilliant (debatable I know) idea of working on the tree itself:
And finally, as I have Valentine's Day ideas in mind, I carved a heart on the trunk ...
All of the above was done in Corel Painter 12 (I love it!) and Adobe Photoshop. I'm a mere beginner at both but I couldn't live without them now.
I'm still undecided as to which one to use or whether to use it at all, though I guess I could put up some cards with the carved heart on it and see if anyone would like that for Valentine's Day. Would you send it to someone you loved? Cheers.