I made this piece months ago, but I just realized that I never posted it on my blog. Oops!

I created a piece for the SVS Third Thursday competition, responding to the prompt, "None of the animals could believe their eyes. The aircraft worked! For the first time Ostrich was actually flying!"

I got a bit of feedback on my original idea here:
http://forum.svslearn.com/topic/439/third-thursday-start

And then created my piece. This is what I turned in for the competition:

And, while it didn't win a free class, it DID win a critique (what I was really after anyway ;-). You can watch the critique here, starting at about 51:44:

And this is the edited version I made based on the critique I received. I chose which corrections I felt were most interesting while also do-able in a reasonable amount of time. Obviously, when not working with an Art Director its up to me to decide how to best make corrections, as well as how much time I want to put in before calling it done. I agree with the suggestion that adjusting the gestures of ALL the animals would be helpful, but would require soooo much re-drawing and ultimately would just be putting more into this piece than I personally feel would be helpful. That would have been a correction best made in the sketching stage I think. I do feel that the piece is much improved now.

Once in awhile you gotta just do a project that is totally for you. Not a job, a "portfolio" project, just something YOU want.

Which I did. :-)

I had this iron-on sitting with my cricut supplies for over a year. I ordered it to make an awesome personalized t-shirt for my dad, but I had a bunch left over. I had no ideas for what I wanted to do with it, though, so it just sat.

Until now.

Awww.

But seriously, with two bookworm parents I don't see how this could be anything but entirely accurate.

In case anyone cares, I thought I'd give a few details about the process of making this image. If you don't care, well... go away.

First, sketches. I've been doodling babies for awhile (its kind of on my mind) and I've been wanting to make this shirt for awhile. I finally started experimenting with different positions and trying to find what worked best.

You can see that I chose the one on the bottom right. The bottom left one was cute too, but I wanted something that looked a bit more fetal, if that makes sense.

So I scanned it into the computer and traced it in Photoshop and cleaned it up.

I then took it into Illustrator and cleaned it up even more. Lots of cleaning.

I saved my image as an SVG so I could take it into Cricut Design Space and cut it out.

This is the video I watched to make sure I did it all right: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DnQXs2Z163c

You'll notice if you look closely at the final project that I kind of messed up a bit on the "weeding" step. Specifically, I didn't get the little dimples in the baby knuckles and the lines in the ears or on the foot weeded out, so they're filled in on the final product. OOPS. I'll have to pay closer attention next time. And I really liked those cute baby knuckle dimples. My bad.

I ironed it on and--voila! Awesomest maternity shirt you ever did see.

When Rich gets home maybe I'll remember to get him to take an actual, like, good photo of me in this shirt, at an angle where you can actually see my belly (I swear I have one!). For now you get a badly lit awkward mirror shot because THAT IS WHAT I CAN DO RIGHT NOW. You're welcome.

(And no, of course we haven't taken the protective cardboard stuff off of the corners of our mirror. Why would we do that? And why would you ever take down Christmas lights anyway?)