Calvin and Hobbes

Initial rough drawing

Pencil sketch of flowers

Final pencils

Almost finished art

Tighter cropping

I'm a longtime fan of Calvin and Hobbes yet for some reason I don't think I ever drew them, luckily artist extraordinaire James 'The Mooks' Howard set Calvin and Hobbes as another of his drawing themes.I imagined other artists would take inspirations from Calvin's exuberance or flights of fancy.
I decided to focus on the obvious love of nature Watterson had, and would occasionally allow Calvin to have - the Sunday strip in which Calvin muses philosophically after discovering a dead bird was in my mind, but I wanted something a touch more positive.
As luck would have it I'd taken a photo of my daughter that I'd thought about using as the basis for a drawing, but my efforts never came out right - perhaps it's because it required drawing her in extreme close up which made getting the balance between my need to keep my drawing cartoony and capturing a realistic likeness? So I decided to use the photo as inspiration for my Calvin and Hobbes piece.

One massive mistake I made here was getting lost in the drawing. My intention had been to crop quite a bit of the drawing. I just didn't like the crouching pose on Calvin, and it was meant to be more about the close up of his face and the flowers/caterpillars, but wanted to draw a bit more to give it a sense of place in my head - even if I did fudge things a little. In the end I didn't crop things enough, so I've included the correctly cropped version here.
The initial rough of this was loads of fun to do, it's drawn A3 size with a thick graphite pencil, and much like the fingerpaintings I've been doing, it felt great to draw with the same abandon I see when my daughter draws. There's an important lesson there, and it's one I intend to pay attention too!