My personal treat for Christmas (Patreon)

HELLO EVERYBODY, EVERY Year around Christmas I get the urge to draw something for the holiday...usually it ends up being something Pokemon related as a treat for the fandom, especially since my Comic's Anniversary is always on the 13th of December.

But what I ALWAYS actually wanna do but nEVER get to do in time is classic Christmas illustrations without any fandoms in mind. I grew up with a lot of Scandinavian influence when it comes to how we decorate our home for the holidays, what art we put up, what children's Literature we discover once more on the attic and also a lot of our Christmas ornaments are quite Swedish!

This influence comes from both sides of the family, as my mom really appreciates the coziness and the traditonal art of countries like Sweden, Norwegian and also Denmark and THEN there's also my Dad's side of the family, which is in fact swedish! I am only one quarter swedish, but my Grandma never taught us the language unfortunately :(

NEVERTHELESS, I am VERY happy I finally took the time to draw something in the spirit of the holiday for myself! The last illustration the like were two Bullfinches I drew in 2019, so IT'S BEEN A WHILE

The sketch up above of the girl with the reindeer is inspired by Carl Larsson's illustrations, a Swedish Artist who lived from 1853-1919. If you're European, you might have seen his artwork before! One of his most famous pieces is probably "Brita as Iduna", which I took MAJOR inspiration of for the look of the girl:

I'll still color the sketch above, but I'll keep the lineart and the colored lines as they are, to preserve the look of a traditional piece, possibly creating the illusion of the art being done completely traditionally or the piece looking older than it is.

I'm very glad the girl turned out so well, it's been roughly around 7 years since the last time I attempted to draw a realistic human, so I was VERY scared to get started at all :'D Excited to finish this over the next week between other tasks!