Full of the Joys of Spring

April brought with it a flush of glorious golden dandelion flowers, and it seemed the perfect time to draw up this picture I'd had in mind a while, Laurence and Ambrose enjoying the spring sun (and the dandelions!)

As with The Farm Boy, this drawing's based on a photo I saw and instantly thought of my boys - the photograph is reposted all over the internet on the picture-sharing sites like Tumblr and Pinterest, but seems to track back to a Finnish photographer called Mikko Puttonen, so hopefully this is the right credit to give it. Obviously I've had to alter the boys' faces, hairstyles, and also change the colourful shorts to rolled-down Edwardian swimwear (the closest thing to shorts they'd have worn in their era), but other than that I've tried to get it as closely replicating the photograph as I possibly could - including all the light and shadow, which was a lot of fun to reproduce when I don't usually draw anything so brightly lit. The background grass gave me too much difficulty to get exactly the same, skintone shading is far easier than blurry abstract shapes as distant grass in a shallow depth of field tends to turn out, so I gave up on copying that and just closed the reference pic to make up a rough idea instead of a proper duplicated version!