A Valentine's Day Surprise

I always get really excited if I discover that another artist and I have had a similar idea (some people get discouraged, but I actually just think it's cool and a little magical). When I saw one of the three Google Doodles this Valentine's Day, I got REALLY excited.

This is actually a screenshot still of it. The actual doodle was animated. You can view them all here. 

The art was done by the immensely talented Google Doodler Kevin Laughlin, whose awesome tumbler you can view here. You can also follow him on Twitter.

Earlier this month, I made a Valentine's Day promotional postcard that I sent out. It looked like this:

(This was the back.)

If you go to my website, I have a handful of illustrations of this hedgehog searching for a Valentine, and the visual joke is that he has a "type." I got the idea from a previous sketch I did years ago (and blogged about):

This was the card I made for my husband (then, boyfriend) while he was still at bootcamp.

I always knew I wanted to revisit this character. You can check out my website to see all of the new illustrations, but here's why I got all excited yesterday:

How funny is that? We had a similar spark and just executed it differently. And for some reason, even though I had been sitting on that hedgehog sketch for a while, I got some sort of push from the Universe to expand on the idea at the beginning of 2016, almost exactly 4 years later. 

Here are the initial sketches of the pieces. Again, all the finished illustrations are on my site.

I hope you all had a Happy Valentine's Day and Presidents Day weekend!