For the past couple of months, interrupted by breaks, I have been working on a big picture!

The image contains musings about a land of love and I’m sure I will want to add things in the future. Perhaps a different LAND OF LOVE image may brew?

With this image I started off doing a big pencil sketch and thought I might hand paint it. However as I tried to dive in with colour I knew that a digital approach was the only way to realize my vision and all the detail I wanted to include.

My plan is to make some printable items from the image. Who doesn't love a big colorful tea towel or maybe a tote bag? The print part I have yet to investigate.

The over riding motivation was, as a wise teacher has said many times, ‘Do the work you want to get’ so here is HEARTLAND.

Here is a window into my process creating the Multilit reader series illustrations. Below are very rough sketches which were the starting point through to approval sketch and then full color printed image. The "very" rough pencil sketches were snapped with my iPhone and used as a guide to redraw in photoshop on a wacom cintiq. This project required a lot of illustrations over a short period of time so using a digital process was invaluable. What I love about working digitally is having the layers and being able to cut and past to move things around. It is also a lot quicker to color digitally and the process works well if you set your color palette at the start of the project and pretty much stick with it. I use the Adobe library tool to keep track of colors and graphics.