For the month of February, the online illustration school that I attend, svslearn.com, is holding a contest. The theme for the month is love. The problem is trying not to be cliche and illustrating it with an original idea. I spent an evening sketching out ideas.
As usual, I started with my kids. I have a photo from our breakfast table where they were just loving each other, or maybe I should say the youngest was loving the older two and they were being very tolerant as she gave them jam-covered hugs. I made a brief sketch of it to get the head positions and then decided to try a second version with each of them as cats or dogs. My Happy Cricket thought she looked much cuter as a dog.
Then I continued with my kid-like thinking and began imagining the expression “a bird can love a fish, but where would they live?”. I imagined it with a whale and a canary dreaming of their home together.
Finally, I took the bird and fish motif a bit further and drew them as yin and yang.
Now I just have to wait for my whirlwind of a toddler to fall asleep and I can go down to the studio to ink them!