Doodles to prints

I am fully engaged now in the creation of the next collaborative puzzle print, which as some of you know, I am launching as a Kickstarter.com project so that we get funded properly this time.
Once I launch I will update that project on my alter-blog http://puzzleprints.blogspot.com
but we're not there yet although so close I'm starting to shake a little.

While awaiting for the final approval process and the final touches on my part, I continued to work on the image which will be the awesome Fantastic Garden with the help of 80 printmaking friends. My creative assignment is to come up with something simple, puzzle-like, to be divided into as many pieces as there will be participants for them to give the image life.

The design has to be simple so I started by looking at my collection of royalty-free clip art and came up with some doodles. I felt like I had stepped into a toon-world of some sort with images of fat-funny bees and rounded flowers floating in my head.

But I couldn't stop there! No, once fully engaged I had to keep doodling. For that, I use Photoshop and my Bamboo tablet with a very responsive pen! I took the birds and flipped them, scaled the tree, added more pond, and some critters under the tree roots. I don't know about anyone else, but those "doodles" take a bit of your life away. I think artists live so long because we turn half an hour into seven, or more accurately, we shrink seven hours of doodling into what seems like 30 minutes, thus "living" 6 and a half free hours during which we don't age at all. It's a theory, no?!

Anyhow, one thing led to another and I came up with the final image, to be modified several more times of course. Here it is, the soon to be Fantastic Garden. Imagine it larger than life 60 x 44 inches in four panels! And all those empty spaces will be filled with my fellow artists' contributions! How awesome is this going to be?!

But of course I couldn't stop there! Not now with all the creative juices flowing like mad...so I thought wouldn't it be super-cool to make some woodcuts from the design with more detail and stuff?! Why not, I have to wait for the participants to cut their blocks anyway, might as well be making art.

So I took the next step and kept on drawing and coloring. I have to say that I don't usually work this way at all but this is a lot of fun. My usual modus operandis is to draw right on the block and take it from there. But this time I'm planning everything ahead.

So here we are after two days of working, the evolution of a little panel which is likely to become one of the rewards for the future backers of the project!

The creative process is kind of cool, I think, things just happen and we artists seem to step out of our mind and body while "something" takes over and doodles away.
This one is called "Tree and a Bee". Should make a cool woodcut.

I better keep working!