Dancing Pigs!

Last summer my daughter started telling me about a silly dream she had about Pigs dancing in tutus and asked if I would design them for her to be on a fleece blanket. So I sketched out some pigs for her "approval" and off we went!

After they were approved (one of the piggies was too fat, so she had to be fixed) I started on color.

I like to draw over my sketches in black marker so my final sketch is nice and neat and then I draw the final images on tracing paper. I don't like pencil marks on my final watercolors so I take the final tracing paper and tape it to the back of my watercolor paper and paint on a lightboard until I get the initial shapes colored in.

I used Tombow watercolor markers for this design, I LOVE those! The colors are so vibrant and I'm able to get nice details with them.

I scanned it in to Photoshop and put the design in repeat.

Then I was stuck...for a while. I just wasn't sure what to do with the background. Everything seemed so busy, or not busy enough. Definitely something I struggled with. My daughter started to think maybe I was never going to finish...

Then I decided to add more flowers behind them and I tweaked the colors to look more like my original artwork.

I was pretty happy with this, it's still busy and I think it still needs something, but turns out it wasn't up to me. Since it was really for Miss Sabrina, she decided it also needed the polka dots (something I had tried and wasn't totally in love with). So here it is, a bit crazy, but in the end, something I really love.

Some pictures of my fabric swatches I received from Spoonflower...fleece on left, cotton on right

The final fleece we ordered yardage of.

I was still toying with maybe making the dots in the ground lighter, I feel they compete with the flowers around the pigs a bit. While I was stuck in indecision, someone ordered the fabric from my spoonflower shop to be made on a tote bag through Sprout Patterns!! So I guess that settles that!