Illustration Friday - Immoveable

With these 'Illustration Friday' challenges I usually tend to go with the first thing that pops into my head and this week was no exception.  When I saw the word "immoveable," the first thing I thought of was a very small creature trying to move a much larger one. I immediately thought of a mouse and an elephant. The mouse is trying to have a picnic on the park bench, but a big elephant has come and plopped herself practically on his lunch, completely oblivious to the little fellow's presence. He is trying to move her over a bit, but to him, she is completely immoveable.

By the way, you can click on all of the images to see them larger.

My original sketch showed a close-up of the scene, but from the beginning I knew I wanted to show the entire elephant. I was using a small sketchbook and I just didn't plan it well enough. I started with the mouse and then ran out of room. I hadn't left enough space to show the elephant. So, I scanned this sketch and created a new digital sketch in Corel Painter.

Originally I wanted to do the drawing from the mouse's point of view and to show the elephant with a lot of foreshortening, so that its legs would seem enormous and its head would be much smaller, but I just couldn't get it to look right. This was my first attempt.

Here is the final sketch that I ended up working from.  You can see that I adjusted the size of the elephant's head and rotated the bench a little bit counter-clockwise. I also tilted the elephant's head down a bit and adjusted the size and placement of the book that she is reading. I also added some background details, including a few birds.  I colored the image using Painter's gouache and watercolor brushes and to outline the drawing I used Painter's digital pen brushes.