My daughter Amelie is finally getting to the age where she can enjoy different events and holidays. This Easter we headed to my mom’s house for the weekend. We went to the St. Louis Zoo, where Amelie could actually run around and check out the animals (she’s real into animals right now, as all almost-two-year-olds are). More on that in a later post.

She was also really into plastic Easter eggs. She likes taking them apart and piling them together. I wanted to do something fun and magical for her first real Easter celebration, and I couldn’t think of anything better than a giant egg hunt.

Usually when I get an idea for a Fantastical picture, I have an idea in my head on what I want the image to look like by the end. A lot of times, making that vision into a reality is more difficult than I anticipated. The good thing, however, is that the process of creating the image becomes this really organic event. And even if the final image isn’t exactly what I expected it to be, the creative process yields something magical. Sometimes it turns out that this new image is actually better than what I had originally intended.

In this case, the final image pretty much exactly matched my original concept. As always, it was a bit more difficult and tedious than I thought it would be. But somehow I made it work, and now I have this great, funny, Fantastical image to commemorate Amelie’s “first” real Easter.