This pen and ink illustration features a scene from Hans Christian Anderson’s The Steadfast Tin Solider, where the little guy is just gazing up longingly at the toy ballerina. I went ahead and populated my scene with all sorts of other little toys and household things. It’s from a really old sketchbook, and was part of a group of illustrations from the same fairy tales that I drew around that time.
Since this has a sort of holiday-feel, I pulled it out the other week while I was browsing through my files looking for things to scan and develop. I did some minimal touch ups to it in Photoshop here and there before I posted the image above, but the original was Micron pens on Bristol board. I haven’t done anything like this in so long, it made me really miss pen and ink! It’s a good thing that my Christmas stocking included a fresh new fine-lining pen!