What's on my desk?

One of the Skillshare classes I'm taking is Kate Bingaman-Burt's Drawing Collections: Illustrating Stories through Taxonomy. In her class we are to produce a collection of illustrations that tell a story about ourselves. We are to make two sets; this is the first I came up with just by watching the first couple of videos and browsing the completed projects.

Finished output

In terms of following instructions, this output is totally wrong, but nevertheless let me take you to the process hehe

The collection I decided to draw was the stuff on my office desk, you're supposed to draw each item on a big sheet, add labels, color it using whatever medium, scan it, and post process it using Photoshop. After doing all those, you can combine and layout all of the items in a single large canvas and marvel at the story you've made a bunch of things convey.

Sadly, here's what I did: I drew them all together on a postcard sized pad and colored the items using watercolor. Then I took a picture of it and edited using whatever app my tablet has. I forgot about the labels cos there isn't any space left.

Pencil outlines

Colored in using watercolor

Outlined digitally

I'm happy with the output, for one, it took me of out the creative slump I've always planned to escape from but never really got the motivation to. And also, I'm less afraid of watercolor now lol.

But then, I should have been more patient and watched all the videos before turning in an output.

Another thing,

There should be no shame in digital post processing, I know. But my finished work was more digital than traditional and sometimes I'm afraid of putting it out 'cos I would be ashamed to show the less stellar but original version. I don't know, but enhancing artworks using Photoshop feels like a stab to my creativity. Do models feel this way when their bodies are shopped for magazine covers?

I was very reluctant to apply filters and adjust brightness and contrast because I thought I will lose the integrity of the piece. But then I realized I was more afraid of screwing the piece by trying to enhance everything manually because there's no undo. :P

Case in point: I shouldn't care less