Making the calendar

A little bit about the process of making my calendar this year. Every year I come up with some sort of theme for the calendar and after some thought this year I wanted to incorporate quotes about seasons and months of the year into it. I dug though various websites that have collections of quotes about seasons and small poems. My favorites are quotes from googlereads , also nature themed quotes from egreenway.com , and finally the best results for poetry I got from poetry.about.com . After I chose my quotes the idea of a group of friends doing various things throughout the year came to me. Of course all the characters are my favorite child-like creatures. For this adventure they are - a girl, orange cat, grey mysterious creature and two foxes.

Next, I drew the pictures on white think paper (actually it's paper designed for work with acrylic paints)

Then I felt that I wanted to have some additional layers to the pictures, not just colored illustration. So I cut the picture out with x-acto knife, leaving some white around the contours and layered the illustration onto craft-like paper. 

Then I colored the illustration with art markers (my beloved Faber-Castell)

and added details with colored pencils, and lastly added the quotes.

Here is another example:

Here I drew some "photographs" in sepia and added them to the illustration. 

More:

A couple of illustrations, including the cover I layered over black paper for more drama :)