HAPPY EARLY HANUKKAH, STARMEN AND DEVIANTS!

My major entry for the Starmen.net Holiday funfest (I may make some smaller entries later on). As you may or may not know, I myself am jewish so I wanted to do something related to my own holiday as opposed to something Christmasy.

Each melody is a candleholder representing one of the eight nights of Hanukkah. Queen Mary (my interpretation of her anyway) is the leader candleholder which lights one more candleholder with each passing night of the holiday. (The reason the piano isn't pictured is because there would have been no way I could have put a piano drawing on the top branch with out horridly cropping it. So instead I stuck in a Spookane ghost holding a candle shaped like a piano key. XD)

I actually had this idea in store some weeks before the Holiday funfest even started, though it's went through a couple changes before I decided on something final. Originally I was gonna draw an actual menorah with the eight melodies on it but I couldn't get it to look right in my sketches. Then I tried having them sit atop the "tree of life" but in the middle of sketching out the concept, it hit me that probably not a lot of people would get how it relates to the holidays unless I explained it. Eventually, I merged the menorah and tree ideas together and came up with this, which I think is identifyable yet not blatently obvious.

The Menorah Tree was made with construction paper and detailed with Prisma markers and black and white pencils. Overall it took about 7 1/2 hours to put together.

The eight melodies and Queen Mary were drawn on Poster paper, colored with prisma markers, then inked with Sakura microns. I then cut them out and glued them onto the tree. Each melody took between 30 minutes-2 hours to do (30-45 minutes for the smaller ones. 1-2 hours for the bigger ones)

The entire picture took 4 days to put together (Though obviously it wasn't the ONLY thing I did those 4 days. XD)

Queen Mary and the Eight melodies are copyright Itoi, HAL, and APE

EDIT: This won first place in "Most Earthboundalicious handart" in the Funfest! FIRST PLACE! I'm shaking even as I type this...