Christmas doodle

A female American Field Mouse and a male Eurasian House Mouse (the latter a head shorter than the former) gaze upon a pinecone decorated like a Christmas tree. The female wears a green dress and a red shawl, while the male wears a trenchcoat.

[Making-of video] [Blog post used in]

Every year I wonder how mice would celebrate Christmas. Clearly, they wouldn't be able to decorate a tree because it would be way too big for them. Cutting off a single branch and decorating that doesn't seem to make much sense. Last year, while we were studying fractals, at one point the teacher mentioned that pinecones were a smaller version of a full tree. That gave me the idea for the background , but I quickly discarded it as silly.

When I woke up on December 24, I wanted to create something Chrismtassy, and this idea came back to me. If I wanted to pull it off, clearly it was key to overcome this silliness with the sheer cuteness of the characters' so that it would portray a special Christmas moment rather than a big joke.

I made a preliminary sketch, and realized that if I actually were to draw a pinecone, I wouldn't be done before the day was up, so I used [the wikipedia picture] on the subject. This picture is CC by Menchi.

I wanted to give it a transparent background, but that would mean erasing the background from the pinecone photo. On the other hand, the white backgroudn gives the picture a nice snowy feel, don't you think?

The shawl is actually doing a good job of covering a lot of things, like the fact that the characters may or may not be holding hands, whether or not the dress has sleeves, and how the coat's sleeves connect to to the coat.