Hello, dear Steemit-friends, lovers of art and the fantasy worlds:

As every week it's a pleasure to thank @juliakponsford for conceiving and curating the interesting contest Art Explosion, whose rules are here. In my opinion, it is the most important of the Visual Arts contests on the Steemit platform in terms of the power to convoke participants from everywhere and in terms of prize amounts.

This week's theme, Fantasy, immediately connected me with the imagery created by that immortal novel written by Lewis Carroll, as is Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. That's why I thought of the illustrations of the great book illustrator, Arthur Rackham (1867 -- 1939), as the starting point for my own artwork.

But this is about Fantasy, so I can imagine everything I want... And I imagined an wonderful world where I don't live in a sad country as is Venezuela right now but in an strange forest in which @juliakponsford was Alice and I was a blue caterpillar smoking so quite...

So, here is my drawing, actually a GIF, which I titled JULIA AND I IN A FANTASYSCAPE, and with which I participating in the ART EXPLOSION WEEK 53: whose theme is FANTASY...

I am not a professional illustrator but an improvised amateur. So you don't expect a big explanation, technically speaking, on how I got to the result I share with you today. I will only briefly describe the steps through which I arrived at the final finish of my GIF.

JULIA AND I IN A FANTASYSCAPE --- STEP BY STEP

I started by processing the image of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland - Advice from a Caterpillar - which autor was Arthur Rackham. Here is the original image opened with FireAlpaca, which was taken from

So, I rotated the image horizontally, and began to turn it into my own drawing, adding elements and intervening it with colors.

And adding more details...

Now it's a matter of giving more depth and emphasis to the main figures.

So, here is the result:

It seemed pertinent to me to add some rays of light coming from Alicia-Julia's forehead and to make the smoke more fancifully colorful.

So I thought that if I superimposed the last two images and gave them movement I could achieve a GIF that I hope you find interesting... I was able to do that through the free software https://giphy.com/create/gifmaker