Concept to final design - a look inside our process

Hello and welcome to my first post here!

Hopefully, you will find this interesting and read along as I use this space now and in the future to talk about how I work, what my process is, what inspires me and how I made my dream(Green Bean Stdio) become a reality.

Okay!

Today I'd like to talk about how I used a used a life motto, and converted it to become a fun love card.

Heads up! - The card design in question contains some PG content.

I believe in doing what I most love and believe in living my life to the fullest.
This includes all kinds of things and interests. Some of them being:
    

    Left to right: reading a book by the lake, enjoying far too many burgers and brownies and dreaming of visiting many amazing places around the world.(the list doesn't stop here!)

I got married at the end of last year :)
and my husband and I had to spend time away from each other, a few months after the wedding.
During this time we missed each other immensely and I wanted to send him a card which would convey this and also that I missed spending time with him - those being some of the things I love doing.

So I decided to go with the text - I believe in doing what I love!

Next I had to decide what kind of illustration would do this justice.
I wanted to keep it simple, fun and fresh...almost like a kids drawing.
Narrowing down--->

I decided to go with crocodiles - they're green (my favorite color) and they generally seemed fun, and I could somehow picture exactly how I wanted to draw them.
I wanted to use the idea of two crocodiles lazing around, looking cute or two crocodiles being sloth like just sitting over each other (their way to cuddle maybe).
I gathered some reference images (pictures sourced from Google).
       
and using these references, sketched some crocodiles.
 
Once I finalized this composition(above) I eventually realized - although this card started out as a simple card, it was quickly turning into a subtle yet dirty card, where the graphics and text could mean something else altogether ;P
I was skeptic to keep working on this at first, as we didn't have any cards in our collection such as this one before (Most of my personal cards over time end up joining the Green Bean Studio collection).
I decided, why not! - I love the idea, I'll send it to my husband. He'll love it.
Using these colors as my rough palette, I began painting
 Press Play to view (video has been sped up) 

A video posted by Aparna Varma Mathew (@greenbeanstudio) on Apr 2, 2015 at 7:11am PDT

 After painting I carefully scanned the image and color corrected it to match the original as closely posssible, added the text and voila! I had a new card to send to my husband.

I sent it out to reach him asap, and he absolutely loved it... he urged me to use to share this card..Yes! apart of doing what you love means taking chances...and I loved this card, if I didn't share what I love then whats the point.
So, this crocodile love card joined the Green Bean Studio collection.

Here's a final look.

Buy the dirty crocodile love card.
Hope you had fun reading this post, and I hope you will come back to read-on about our adventures and about all the other things we love!
-
Aparna
P.S. Here are the recipes for the delicious avacado burgers and brownies.