The Bleeding Heart Bunnies
My inspiration for this design comes from my Oma's garden. Every spring she spends hours every day culminating her beautiful flowers only for rabbits and squirrels to eagerly chew them up. My Oma will extend her kindness to the birds by putting seeds in a bird feeder and water in a fountain for them but will not humor the larger mammal thieves. My design is symbolic to how my Oma is not a bleeding heart (overly sympathetic) to bunnies.
I began by creating the shapes of the bleeding heart flowers which took me quite a while since I wanted to capture a lot of the detail in the leaves. I did this using the pen and smooth tools.
I wanted to add a few more small shapes on the inside of the flowers and the bunny because I thought it would add some depth to the design.
I added some colour to the flowers and bunny choosing from the colour pallette I had made before in addition to a few patterns I thought were appropriate for rabbit fur.
For the background I created a checker-board pattern and then rotated it 45 degrees so it created a diamond. I arranged the bunnies around the center of the design and changed the outline colour of every other rabbit to create an optical illusion.
Then I added the flowers two of which I also altered the outline colour of.
In the centre I added a singular bleeding heart and changed a few of the textures to make it stand out a bit more.
In the background I added a few bushlike shapes and filled them with a green leafy texture.
In the end I felt like the final design was in the ballpark of what I intended but not quite playful enough. If I were to improve it I would alter the rabbits to look a bit more cartoony (make the eyes bigger, make the rabbits bigger in general, use a reference image where they look more animated), lighten the background and experiment with more stylistic lineart.
