night song : shadowbox for a nursery

I'm currently working on a commissioned piece from co-owners, Christy & Sherri of Paisley Place Designs. Christy was privy to seeing the "owl's tree" shadowbox at a baby shower, that I made as a gift for my good friends Kelli & Chris Taylor of Purple Tree Photography. She liked it so much that she contacted Sherri and together they decided they had to have a commissioned piece done for a nursery. The piece is called "night song" and is still in progress. I'll post the finished piece once it's done but, I know some people like to see artwork in stages.

I did two concept sketches for them. Here's the preliminary sketch they chose to go with. The major colors will be greens, browns and yellows, with a few accent colors and details. The bird itself will be needle-felted, a real-wood stick for the tree branch, tiny modern shaped stars & clouds. The background will be done in a patterned-modern paper, by a paper company that I just adore called Cosmo Cricket.

After the sketch, I decided to make the shapes of the clouds and stars in Illustrator. Since I was already creating vector-based art, I decided to sort of lay out the whole thing as a quick flat graphic. I printed it, cut it out, and slid it into the shadowbox frame to make sure I liked the proportions of everything. Now the fun part... creating all of the pieces!

More to come soon! Stay tuned...