“The other penguins gobbled their meals. Pip preferred to taste his fish.”

I am in the early stages of a picture book starring Pip, the penguin at the right in the illustration. I sketched this image for my first set of thumbnails. Since then, the story has shifted—as stories often do—so the scene will no longer be part of the book. But I grew fond of the picture, so I thought I’d make it for my Facebook Timeline cover photo. (The cover photo dimensions are wider than they are tall, which is why I included extra snow.)

For this illustration, I mostly used your run-of-the-mill scrapbook paper and cardstock with a bit of the “good stuff” (a.k.a., Japanese Yuzen Paper from Paper Source) on the fishtails and fin. The snow is a plain rice paper set on a blank sheet of watercolor paper.

Thanks for looking! I hope that you enjoyed meeting Pip.