Before starting this piece I had been practicing and playing around with coloured pencils while using Pre-raphaelite as my subject. I found myself specifically drawn to a painting by John William Waterhouse called Hylas and Nymphs because of the colours used for the water and the way you see the Nymphs bodies through it. I tried to capture the same look as in the painting by layering the coloured pencil. After looking at more paintings and saw that a lot of Pre-raphaelite artists had women in beautiful scenery as their subject, so decided to do the same thing with my drawing.

As this project is the final one before the end of the semester and Christmas fast approaching, I thought it would be a good idea to make cards that I could sell. These cards will be given out to friends and family this year, and could possibly sold on a website such as Etsy. 

I started by looking at Illustrated Christmas cards and noticed a lot of the ones I was drawn too had cats or dogs in them. These kind of cards are usually popular with many people as they themselves have a furry friend at home, so I decided to go with this idea and use my dog as my reference.

The subject of my work is my dog in his Christmas pudding costume by a Christmas tree. I found inspiration for the colour and the Christmas tree from a photo of my own Christmas tree. I used the photos below. 

After finishing the illustration for the Christmas card I searched for a website to were I could send off my design to get it printed as a card. After searching and looking through reviews, I came across vista print.