Teeney O'Feeney Group Illustration

Another illustration from the book project Teeney O'Feeney king of the Leprechauns. Here we have a group of characters from the Faerie Realm. I decided to depict this group the same way my sketch pages tend to unfold which is a kind of random spread of characters scattered about the paper. I wanted this last of the full page illustrations to be different than the others and was really curious to see if I could actually paint one of these sprawling compositions which are so easy to improvise in a sketchbook. As it turns out it is rather difficult to try and tie all the individuals together. Brian Froud is of course very good at this kind of picture making and he was definitely the inspiration behind my decision to go this way but I didn't want to just copy his approach. He spends weeks if not months on his very complex pictures and I only had a few days to do mine but nevertheless I wanted to try because I love this kind of group portrait style of illustration - especially when the portraits are whimsical.