Happy ducklings

di Ioana Micleușanu @ratza7

Introduction

Hello! I'm an architect based in Bucharest, Romania. Beside that I'm volunteering for the De-a Arhitectura association by exploring and re-imagining the built environment with primary school children and I'm also doing a post-graduate program for teaching young children.
My maiden name was Rață - which translates as Duck :) and the illustration I made is of me and our two daughters - very sweet and talkative :D.
I wasn't working from home and it was a bit of an improvisation. The first draft was made at a playground, in a village in the hills.
Then I tried coloring it with various techniques.
I didn't have a paper suited for watercolor - and this is my first attempt at drawing after a long pause, so a bit of rustiness is to be expected.

Supplies

I used a mecanic pencil 0.5 to draw the outline, then a 0.4 Artline pigment ink pen to draw the outline more firmly, an eraser.
I made several attepts at coloring with Neocolor II - water soluble color crayons and Faber-Castell Albrecht Durer watercolor pencils - but I didn't like the final result, so I decided to use Gimp and textures from the internet to apply color to the line drawing.

The Outline

I did several duck sketches in a graphite pencil, even a rabbit and a duck-lion :)
I looked at animal photos on Pinterest.

Momma Duck and her enthousiastic little ducklings

I finnaly settled on a sketch. But then...I didn't like the final result.

Try again! Another one bites the dust _ or the dustbin in this case!

So I tried again!

Landing mother Duck

Still not happy :))

Gimp

Then I decided to try some internet textures. I have some saved more than 10 years ago - I lost the source, but the others I found mostly on Freepik.
I uploaded the basic outline in Gimp, I selected the various zones - I made a fill layer to remember the mask, then I added the textures and I used the mask from the fill layers to crop it exactly where needed. The violet sky is from a picture I made in British Guyana in 2009 - of the sky reflected in the water.
Other textures:
- Designed by coolvector / Freepik
- Freepik hand_painted_teal_colour_watercolour_design_3005
- Designed by starline / Freepik