Minotaur in a Wagon

Sometimes I feel like a drawing was meant to be and I’m just lucky to have been the one to draw it. This drawing of a minotaur feels that way to me.

I started by tracing a circle with a charcoal pencil. I didn’t know what I was going to draw. I had no clear direction or goal. I was just waiting for inspiration. In this case, the circle became a head with a pair of eyes, then a minotaur—one of my favorite characters from ancient mythology. I thought it would be funny if the minotaur was stuck inside a child’s wagon, so I drew that.

But who was pulling the wagon? I figured it had to be a child. I wasn’t sure how I wanted the child to pose, so I turned to a book of illustrations by Maurice Sendak. He’s one of my favorite illustrators and has inspired some of my whimsical drawings. I sketched the girl in charcoal, scanned it, then cleaned it up in Photoshop.

I put the Photoshop files into Adobe Illustrator and used the Image Trace feature to turn the sketches into vectors. I created a new layer for color, created shapes with the pen tool, and then filled them. And voilà, the minotaur and the girl came into being.