I’ve been working on an art project for a few days.  It was really a glorified excuse to think happy thoughts about a friend who recently had a baby, but that’s okay.  I figured that if the project went well, it could be customized for other folks and sold on my (someday soon to be opened) Etsy shop.

The original efforts for this project were flower-centric, but something about that didn’t feel right.  While Ellie’s mom loves nature and flowers and such, she’s more of an animal rehabilitation/hiking/kayaking/loves-taking-care-of-people kind of person than a fancy-floral-arrangements kind of person.  She spent lots of summers in Africa, too.  So what’s better than flowers and a baby’s name?  Animals and a baby’s name!

Unfortunately, I’m not in the habit of painting African animals.  That meant some practice with basic drawing and cursive E’s (not really in my repertoire, either).

Cool, I can write in cursive now.  Not sure how the squirrel snuck onto the next page.

And then it was time to get to the fun stuff.

After a magic time-lapse, this is where I arrived:

I like that Ellie’s name is an important part of the painting, but it’s a little bit subtle in the sky (more subtle across the room than in this picture).  Because I liked the painting a lot, I got nervous about doing the ink drawing layer that I had originally planned for it.  Enter painting number two, which is more or less the same as the one above, with the additional layer of ink drawing on top.

So the advantages of the second version seem to be that the animals have more personality, and the name stands out more.  Despite those advantages, I think I like the plain version better.  What do you think?