"What Love Means To Me" (textless version)

About 3 1/2 hours in Corel Painter, using mostly "soft charcoal" tip, which works very much like traditional pastel or colored pencil. Tablet used is Wacom Intuos3. Drawn (it felt and looks more like a painting though...) from scratch. The version with text uploaded into "contest" category is an entry to dA's "PAPER HEART Movie Poster Contest". This is the original image file before text was added.

The foreground (hands making a heart shape) was intentionally drawn in soft focus in order to bring the attention to the pregnant wife, the couple's young child, and the family dog, by putting them into sharp focus, and also to enhance my theme "Family is what love means to me.", seen from the husband's perspective, and of course, to give the illusion of depth of field.

My first realistic painting in ... too long to remember. And this is my first realism in digital. I guess I got lucky this time. Usually, themed contests throw me off. I ponder upon the theme and nothing definite comes to mind -- at least, not enough to drive me into drawing/painting anyway. This time though, I did have an answer to the question "What does love mean to you?", and I was able to respond with an image. The idea came right after I read the annoucement about the contest. It always helps when I have a definite picture in my mind to go after.

The base doodle/sketch only had the outline of the hands, horizon, figures in silhouette in the background. ^^ I can't "draw" wispy clouds like these in lines.

©Aruarian Dancer