Book Illustration - A Walk Among The Flowers

I had to make a little cat enjoying the flowers - so this is what I drew.  It's a pencil drawing on photocopy paper, without any corrections.  I did have a glitch in the tendril coming out of the flower in the left corner when my own KittyKat, always curious to see what Mommy is drawing, nudged my elbow (she was on my lap, as usual).  But I was too lazy to go looking for an eraser so I let it be, hoping to fix it while coloring the picture.

Then I scanned my drawing, and then using Levels in Photoshop, darkened the lines a bit, so it looks more like I used black ink rather than pencil.  Dark lines help when you want to color your drawing with Illustrator.

After opening the file in Illustrator I converted the drawing to a Live Paint Tracing, which allows me to quickly paint individual segments using the paint bucket.

So here are two variations using essentially the same colors, although not the exact shades.  It's interesting to see how the colors interact visually when you change their proportions.

I'm not sure which one I like better, though I do prefer the red background.

The kitty looks happy either way!