I love all the colors of fall so I have been itching to do an illustration to celebrate the season. I had these photos in my “things to draw” file for literally 5 years. Well it was about time. I used the two pictures below with my daughters as reference and combined elements from both.

I did a rough pencil drawing and decided I wanted to put my character in a skirt outfit instead. My daughter Sevan is a big skirt fan and since I was using her as my reference, I took my artistic license to change her outfit. Another consideration I had was that she had a pony tail in the photo but I did not like the way it looked in the illustration, so I changed her hair to pigtails. Once I finalized the details, I retraced my lines with the micron ink pen and waited about 10 minutes for it to dry completely. I then erased all my pencil lines and started coloring it with my Prismacolor Brush pens.

This is the final. It took me about 3 hours from start to finish. I couldn’t sleep until it was done and I finally went to bed around 1:00 am! I think it’s one of my favorite pieces. It’s very nostalgic for me and it’ll always remind me of when my baby was 5 and put a smile on my face. Hope you like it too.