Hedgehog

I was riding in the car with my wife one evening after work, discussing ideas for watercolor images, when she suggested a hedgehog playing in the sand. I decided right there to paint that image for her as a gift. My first sketch was not that great:
I felt this hedgehog looked a bit too much like Sonic the Hedgehog, and he looked sort of unhappy, so I started over and came up this sketch:
Here’s my revised sketch, where I decided to clarify what this hedgehog has been building:
I then did a color comp in Photoshop to figure out how to do the colors. Here’s what I settled on:
You’ll notice that in my final I added some ocean to the background, because I got done replicating my comp with watercolors, and I felt like something was missing. The addition of the water seemed to tie everything together. I had a lot of fun painting this hedgehog and my wife loved it!