Baby wisdom

For my first piece in Adobe Illustrator, I made this drawing for my friend Kim who is expecting her first baby. I used it as the frontispiece for a book collecting wishes and advice from her friends and family. I had very much wanted to call it "Wisdom our babies taught us," but there were a few people in the mix that that title would have left out. Maybe the title I used is more whimsical. And I like whimsy, after all.

The colours are very flat, which is attractive on the blanket but jarring in the sky. I still have to figure out gradients (colours that shade from light to dark) in Illustrator, but I think that you can't do those with the Live Paint feature.

This is the ink drawing I made first. I imported it into Illustrator and applied an automated tracing tool. That's why the lines are so rounded and uniform in comparison to my drawing. I could have made the trace more faithful to my drawing, but I don't know how to do that yet. Fourteen days left in the trial!