Layers (and the layers within the layers)

Greetings all :)

A couple of weeks have passed, and I'm still chipping away at the creative cannon that is Illustration Friday.
One of the finished pieces I'd like to share today was created while working on the idea umbrella of the word "Layer".

I sat back for a day or two and watched to see the potential idea gamut that would roll in on the Flickr Pool.  There were a lot of cakes, a lot of cross sections, but, to my delight - no eccentric, esoteric pieces.

I'm talkin'bout auras, yall.

I won't get too deep on the concept (that's what Google is for, after all!) but an aura is an energy field (actually, roughly 7 according to my current research/reading)  that surrounds each one of us - we just can't see them. Energizing them can be done a number of ways, one of my favourites involves crystals and natural stones from the earth. Each auric layer is represented by a number of stones.

For this illustration, I picked the strongest stones and went to town.

First I started out with a couple of body samples and a shot of my head to kind of get a rough idea of how I wanted the body to be positioned. This took time, mainly due to my perfectionist attitude, and the need to ensure the proportions were right.
For the body, I consulted the book from which I've been retaining all this information: The Chakra Handbook.

The next steps were all about improvising. As you can see here, I wasn't necessarily following the models shape for shape, but more for an idea of positioning and proportion.

I leave the style up to my imagination and intuition (as all artists should).

Here the basic body is done. All that is left to illustrate are each of the 7 separate layers starting from the legs up to the head, and then the bubble this yogi intends to rest within.

To allude to the stones associated with each layer, I went digging for macro images of each stone to create a separate layer path (ha! see what I did there?) for each one.

The result, needless to say, is a colourful decal/sticker kind of effect - something I'd quite like to see on notebooks, art boxes or guitar cases. I love the vibrance of each layer and really enjoyed the response I received from it's initial posting. 

So there you have it! Stay tuned for more goodies, friends!