Here are some recent illustrations I did of mischievous Christmas house elves. As mentioned in my last post, this project got me back into using watercolours. The original images look even better, but I had a lot of limitations because of my scanner's quality. These have been tweaked in Photoshop to restore some of the subtle colour variations.
I like to think the girl has an unintentional likeness to Bjork. 
... and the Dad-Elf.
A lot of my elf and gnome research was provided by a German-language copy of 'The Big Book of Gnomes' by Wil Huygen and Rien Poortvliet. If you ever come across this strange Dutch tome, it's worth a look. It's an in-depth study of everything related to gnomes, from their mating practices to diagrams of their houses. Poortvliet's paintings are amazingly realistic, like a lovely old bird-watcher's guide ... except all about gnomes.
