Holiday Account ...Damn elf !

The best winter holidays are harvested in July. And this "holiday card" image was seminated last September, so it's been brewing for nearly a year, and has come to fruition as of last week, mid July. The proper aging of an illustration is a precarious undertaking which involves rotating the rough sketch on a tri-daily basis, and limiting it's exposure to the sun to the early hours of the morning, and the waning sunset stream. Applying ink to the final at the wrong time of the year can lead to a dry and flaky drawing...
(actually the rough sketch has just been sitting on my desk waiting for me to get it done).
All ink and brush.

© Richard Ewing all rights reserved
Thank you and enjoy.

Holiday Account ...Damn elf !

It's been a couple of years since I've produced the family holiday card. (it happens) Below is my return to the genre, as we have Santa the proprietor et unrelenting boss trying to get his proletarian artisan back on the job. (Damn elves! --their labor is cheap, but oh the headaches --always hiding and slacking off!) The drawing below is fairly near the final. Problems needing adjusting include his hand/arm which unfortunately reads more like a salute than the searching gesture I was intending. As we all know, Santa salutes no one --(except Rudolph of course). So in order to avoid Kringlesque litigation, I will have to void out those fingers I've grown fond of, and flatten out the hand pose. The elf needs to move back a tad, and perhaps be a bit overlapped by the lower part of Santa's girth... I'll have to see how it goes.
O-U-T spells out.





















© Richard Ewing all rights reserved

Here's how the the hand may read in the final.

















© Richard Ewing all rights reserved

Some of the first few sketches made in the exploratory stages of the concept. At first sleeping was the elf's wont, but TV seemed more annoying.












© Richard Ewing all rights reserved