Rhapsodies

For today’s nursery rhyme, “Dance Thumbkin, Dance!” I’ve come to the conclusion that children sitting on their parent’s lap is something I have to add to the bin, containing cats and horses, of things I can’t draw without a reference.

Anyway with this one it was a choice between taking the rhyme completely literally and have a picture of five men dancing, which probably wouldn’t make much sense or the way I chose with a mother singing the song with her child while wiggling each finger, which is difficult to make clear in one panel… perhaps if  I had done it more as a closeup.

On a side note, as I’d said previously, I’ve been rereading A Song of Ice and Fire… So I couldn’t help thinking about a very different finger dance when I was drawing this.