Children's Book Process Post - 'February'

Other process posts in this series
'January'

Welcome to another installment of my process posts detailing how I created an illustration for my children's book. Today I'll be discussing how I painted 'February' (pictured above).

Unlike January, where I started the sketch, then came back to it a while later - February was much more straightforward. I, for the most part, knew exactly where I was going with as soon as we decided the direction of the painting. Here's what I sent Ashley (the writer).

The first two were really variations on the same idea - a space-setting full of various celestial objects, varying from planets to galaxies to stars, etc. The last sketch had a more human-centric POV where we would see a lot of what was in the first two sketches, but as if we were watching it from some kind of barren landscape. You know, love.

Ashley, the writer, chose the second one, which was my choice as well (as you might have seen, another illustration took a similar position as the last sketch here and I think that was the right choice for that month as well).

The chosen sketch isn't actually too far off from the final painting, but I did play around with the layout a lot. While painting this illustration, I also made the decision to have a heart in every illustration. I more or less had to make the final decision because the central element in the illustration did take a heart-like shape (on purpose, of course).

At first, I was worried whether the heart was a little too obvious. But then I thought it would be a fun exercise to add a heart in every illustration with some hearts more hidden than others. I mean, if children would be reading this, why not give them a nice little game? After getting the okay from Ashley I went full-steam ahead with this illustration, playing around with the heart-shaped galaxy and having fun with my gas giants (I was/am a HUGE astronomy nerd, having read books during library periods all throughout elementary school).

I also looked at various photos of space and the universe (thank you NASA and Hubble!). I felt like my original sketch was missing something and I loved the dusty apparitions that were in these photos. Here's one I remember looking at often for inspiration. I would add it below but you kind of really need to see it full-sized to appreciate it.

After looking at these photos, I added that swirl of cover on the top-right to balance out the painting. This was probably the part that took the longest because it was quite hard getting it to look the way I wanted. Weirdly, since painting this, I've had (or decided) to paint similar kind of themes and now I'm feeling kinda comfortable painting space things. Funny, really.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy February as much as I did making it!