Behold: the drawing progression of my second picture with a human (in conjunction with dala animals, that is). It’s fun to incorporate the traditional clothing (folkdräkt in Swedish; bunad in Norwegian) of the Scandinavian countries. The little girl’s dress is based on traditional garments from the Misterhult parish in Tuna (Småland), Sweden. She probably shouldn’t be wearing a white apron (regardless of tradition, what child would ever keep it clean tramping about the countryside?), but I’ll claim artistic license.

This was another really large drawing: 18×24″, over four times the size of regular printer paper. It makes for a lot more progress drawings (assuming the progress indicates one day’s worth of work) than my usual size–11×14″. Envisioning backgrounds has never been easy for me, so if you look closely, you can see I only penciled the subjects at first. Then once they were done, I sketched out the background and subsequently changed it at least two more times before hitting on the final idea. I think I’ve finally learned to pencil it in lightly. Now if I had paid attention to how awkwardly long the foal’s legs looked before I colored them in, I might not have had to work so hard to disguise that particular error in the background!