I started this class because I love working with tangible materials and I'm a sucker for paper crafts.  Also, I've been in a bit of an illustration funk lately so I decided to try a totally new medium.  As far as subject matter, I knew I wanted to do something personal and I'm currently working on a dog project, so I thought I'd create a small illustration of my dog Zoe with her most favorite toy in the whole wide world, her moo cow.

   To start, I did about 20 thumbnails...

I really loved the innocent puppy gestures, so I decided to go for a pose with Zoe cleaning her baby cow.

Thankfully I had some reference to help me with this weird perspective...

From here I sketched further, trying to finalize the gesture and elements making up my composition.

And my final drawing...

I had a lot of fun breaking down each piece and figuring out how the layers will work and effect one another.  In my illustration there were a bunch of complicated overlaps, and I ended up gluing a lot more pieces down than I would have liked.

Here is some of my work in progress...

And my final...

For my background I chose a simple dot pattern.  I didn't want it to be super busy, but I like the little bit of raised texture this paper had.  I think if I did this over again, I would have made her gesture more playful and expressive, and/or added more to the background.

Zoe approves!

This was such a fun project, and I'm excited to try another illustration with this technique!