Illustration: Happily Ever After

I'm sure there were more sensible things I could have been doing with my time while waiting on work, but sometimes you just need to do something for no other reason than that you feel like it, and this is one of those things. Plus, I have a brand spanking new lightbox (which I adore) and wanted to try it out!

I had been working on an illustration to go with Galileo's Daughter, but fortunately I didn't get too far. I made a mistake with the start of the watercolour and set it aside to think about... and somehow my dog got up to it and stomped all over it with her muddy paws. And that was the end of that illustration (that's why it was fortunate that I didn't get too far). The world must have been telling me that it was better to just start over! 

However, there was still the other side of the paper, and the Galileo illustration had only taken up half the paper anyway, so I still had half a page of paper, pristine except for some pawprints on the back. So I used it as a companion piece to my earlier Snow White watercolour, because I felt like drawing medieval costume.

I'm not as happy with the prince as I could be, but decided that as he does look rather like old medieval illustrations, he could stay that way. Anyway, does it actually specify 'handsome' anywhere?

Here's the companion piece, Snow White when she is much younger:

I had started a sketch like this a couple of months ago, but abandoned it, so I went back to it and completely redid it so that it worked:

And then I inked it (using my new lightbox. So exciting!)

Most of the inking was done with a Pentel Brush Pen, but a few of the finer details, and the trees, were done with an Artline Drawing System pen. 

And here are a couple of details:

I don't usually go so overboard with the patterns, but it was a lot of fun to make the fabrics really sumptuous.

Winsor and Newton watercolours with Series 7 brushes, Pentel Brush Pen and Artline Drawing System Pens, on Moleskine Watercolour paper. And a tiny bit of Copic Opaque White for a few highlights.