New piece - start to finish

Here's a new piece I'm working on, although why I feel the need to do a mushroom is a bit of a mystery, but, whatever. I keep coming back to it so I figured I might as well go ahead and see how it turns out! I thought I'd share my process, so here are the initial scribbles:



Once I have an idea of the shape and how I might construct the piece, I move from paper and pen to Adobe Illustrator:


Once I have a rough drawing in Illustrator, I can resize it all I want (yay vectors!) Metal clay shrinks after it's fired (12% to 15%) and I can calculate this and get an idea of what the final size will be. I'm also still trying to decide if I should do the mushroom on a round background or not. I plan on making this in the coming days so we'll soon see if it turns out good or not!