The background story for Whimsy...

For those who know the Friends series, there is a song that Ross was singing as a little boy:

I am Bea,
I drink tea,
Won't you dance around
With me?

For some reason, when reading the week's theme, this little song started playing in my head. What followed was "Bea" metamorphosing into "bee" and then the two ideas (of Bea drinking tea and of Bee) merged into one and created the image you see here...

Hello there, long time no see...

So what's new with you? Me, I have decided to try out some of the prompts in the 52 Week Illustration Challenge. As the title suggests, there is one topic for each week, going on for an entire year.  Below is the list of the 2017 prompts.

Here are a few work-in-progress images for the 2nd picture in the series of Seasons, namely Summer.

For some time now, I was thinking about creating a series type of project, containing several pieces linked together through a theme. I like having something to look forward to, when it comes to creating.

So I decided to have a theme centered around seasons, one painting for each of them. But how to represent a season? With a landscape? Specific colors? Flowers? Animals? People? Then I thought: "How do seasons affect our emotions, and towards what kind of activities do they guide us? What do we feel the most in each season?" And the answer was "freedom" and "open space" in the spring, "lazy contemplation" in the summer, "melancholic inner retreat" in the autumn, and "childish happiness" in the winter. So I tried to capture those feelings through the illustrations.

Today is the work in progress for Spring.

What it is stronger: the need or the want? How do we measure a necessity that we might not even be aware of? How can we make a comparison between the primordial needs versus daily wants? The first ones swim in the waters of our subconscious struggling to keep us alive (as in "feeling alive"), while the others kick us in the head all day long, screaming off the top of their lungs "pick me! pick me!". Can we really decide what is the right thing for us?...
 
The illustration is a very personal translation of what the heart needs, rather than what the eye sees. It never ceases to amaze me how the contact with nature awakens anew all this rush of numb feelings that were lost in living the everyday life, without even noticing it. It's like the story of the frog that is boiled in gradually warmed up water, and ends up... well, you know... dead. Metaphorically or not.

Here are few images with the work in progress:

The inspiration for the piece came literally from the street... A few days ago this cute girl passed by me and I couldn't take my eyes off her stockings, so I decided to make a drawing of her (actually more of her stockings than her). She looked quite "springy" with her little pastel flower skirt and the bunnies on her legs.

Here are a few snapshots of the piece "Bunny stockings girl", while working on it.

Some of you might find it interesting to see how an illustration (in this case ASMR Escape) is colored. For this reason, I have scanned the image several times while working on it.
The first thought was to post the images themselves here, I then realized it would be much more fun to animate the entire workflow so the changes can be seen as an organic evolution from one phase to another.

Note: reducing the image resolution was a necessary compromise in order to keep the file size reasonable.