Here is one of the reasons the little girl is looking put off about this whole bit about having tea with Ogres.

Here is a close up of the little girl. The flowers on the lower part of her dress are poppy flowers. Poppy flowers symbolically can represent imagination.

This is the first sketch for the painting. It is called a Thumb Nail Sketch. It is done small and quick to lay out my initial ideas for the painting. Getting it out of my head and down on paper.

In the upper left corner is a design for the tea cups. To the right are designs for the embroidery on the little girls dress. The lower left is just sketching out what the girls hat may look like with a fury hat band.

Here I'm just working out what the background trees will look like. The rough lumps in the foreground are the Ogres and the little girl.

With this early Ogre design I also was starting to work out what style of clothing the Ogres would be wearing.

Here is one of my earliest drawings of an Ogre having tea. He doesn't seem to be very happy about it at all.

The current painting I'm working on is titled "Tea with the Ogres". A lot of pre-work goes into creating a painting of this size and detail. So I've decided to post the sketches from my various sketch books to help illustrate this.