During the month of may, my daughter will celebrate her first birthday ever! :D

Because of that I decided to do this portrait of her. I loved doing this piece so much, even when I had very little free time to finish it. The whole Illustration process took a couple of days.

The Illustration started with the third and last sketch. It was made with mechanical pencil over a very cheap half sheet of letter sized bond paper. I have a Sketchbook (a fancy one) but I almost never use it :/ ... it must be feeling very lonely and depressed.

The next step was to draw the outline over the quick sketch in Photoshop. I have an old Wacom Tablet that makes this part not as hard as it would be. I try to draw most of my pieces outside the machine because I hate the perfectly-sharp looking computer generated graphics, but in this case I took the other direction.

Still inside Photoshop, I started colloring the diferent sections of the drawing. My whole Illustration process is "non-destructive", it enables me to make changes in every step as I pleased.

After finishing the coloring part I decided that the black outline was very heavy visually, so I made some selections and changed the color of those black thick lines (that I like a lot). Also, I tweaked the color with some adjustment layers and overlaped color gradients in the butterfly wings. I like how this work turned out all the way from that little messi sketch. What do you think?