IF - Drifting: Adelia's Heart

As I move forward in trying to build up a children's book illustrator portfolio (the long term goal) and the small gallery show at Nickelodeon Animation (short term...which is coming up way too soon), I'm drifting further and further away from the character that I originally created.

This little gal was supposed to be the next Olivia - and then I just couldn't come up with a decent enough story - I've done up a dummy and sent it out to several companies, but no luck...

I did this drawing originally in watercolor, a couple of years back. Then, as I was developing my children's book I was experimenting with a style of shading/texture that worked for a time, but I've drifted past that as well. This is the original photoshop color (with hatchey texture):

And this is the new version. As with the original, the lines were created in Adobe Illustrator and then pasted into photoshop and colored. The main difference (as they're almost exactly the same color and light source) is the coloring technique. I've moved on to more of a painterly brush stroke look. And that's where my current drawings are. It's been difficult to leave brush strokes in...as my instinct is to completely smooth out the color...but while it's a struggle, I think I'm making headway and it's looking pretty decent...

Also - the color is slighty less saturated - the reason why is that I did the first one in RGB color and the new version in CMYK (rgb for web, and cmyk for print) - as I'm printing these out for the show...and I think the feet (in the original) were way too bright yellow...