Are there places you'd like to return to?

The first version, painted in Corel Painter 11.

The word for this week's 'Illustration Friday' challenge is "Return." I've been thinking a lot lately about a place where I use to live. It was an old farm house in Washington state that was situated across the road from a meadow on the edge of a small forest. It was a place where I use to walk my dogs every day. I moved away from there 5 years ago when the relationship I was in fell apart and I've never felt as homesick for a place as I have for that house, meadow and forest. Lately I've begun to dream about it. For the past couple of months, I've had a dream almost every week that I have returned to that location. The house has since been sold and someone else now calls it home. I will probably never go back there, I think it would break my heart to go back and see someone else living in a place that I once felt was mine. But it did inspire me to create this image of an old woman returning to a favorite spot. Maybe it's a spot that she's never left, but returns to every day on walks with her dog.

I painted this illustration in Corel Painter 11 and then played around with it a bit, creating a new version by tweaking it in Photoshop using a Mister Retro filter to give it a sort of aged graphic feel. I then imported that version into Illustrator where, using the 'Trace' feature, I turned it into a vector image which simplified the shapes.  I saved that image as a tif file and then reopened it in Photoshop where I adjusted the colors.

The 2nd version, using the Mister Retro filter in Photoshop which added halftone dots.

The vector image version created in Illustrator and then adjusted in Photoshop.