Convention Preparation - Taming the Unicorns

Hello there,

with some new conventions coming up for me this year, it's time to get into preparing new merchandise and hopefully nice things for my customers.

Last year I had the following Unicorn with me as a poster print and postcard, which was quite popular and led to many lovely conversations and bright smiles among people passing by.

Thinking about new products, the idea surfaced to make a series of Unicorn illustrations to accompany this piece. For me it made the most sense to think of it in terms of the four seasons and take that as my starting point.
Keeping the existing image as it is and label it as the autumn illustration, I need three more: Spring, Summer and Winter.

As ideas for images tend not to just pop into my head, I started the project by doing thumbnail sketches. An excerpt of these you can see here:

They are super rough (and there's a whole bunch more on my hard drive). They just serve the purpose to me of developing ideas and compositions and aren't supposed to be beautiful or readable to others.
But they are a crucial step for me nonetheless.

Choosing my favourite thumbnail sketches, I bring them together and apply rough colours, to see if the four images can actually work together as a series:

It's very important to me that every season gets a distinct colour scheme to separate itself from the others. But all aim at being feel-good images. They're not about doing something deep, but something nice.

From there, most of what I need to go on is already defined. Now it's pretty much sitting down and paint, and paint, and paint.
This is a bit more recent overview:

The most work went into Spring and Summer so far.

I notice I'm not happy yet with Winter, so I might scrap that one completely and go back to the thumbnail sketches, looking for something else. That's easiest at the current stage, where I did not spend much time on it yet.

We'll see where this is going to go. I hope it's interesting to have a look at what's going on behind the curtains.
I hope to follow up on these soon!