Thranduil and the Yarn Duel - DoodleDoodledayeo 9

This week, @opheliafu's Doodle Doodledayeo prompt was Wool / Elf / Decorations. This immediately brought to mind the fact that my maternal grandmother used to have some Christmas decorations that were plastic elf heads with knit or crocheted bodies, I assume they were some kind of craft project from back in the day. Even though I wasn't crazy about the idea I figured I'd try to draw one of them. I assumed that lots of people must have had these things, but when I tried to search for a photo reference on the net I couldn't find any that looked exactly right. This was enough to push me to try a better idea...

Thinking about Wool + Elf, I thought I might slip in a geeky reference by making some kind of pun about wood elves. And in that spirit I thought of Thranduil, the king of the wood elves from The Hobbit. He's this guy, from the Rankin/Bass animated version:

I thought maybe I could do something with the "thran" and "yarn", since they sort of sound the same. Thran / duil... Yarn / duil... Yarn duel.

Hey, you know what else Rankin/Bass produced? Those animated christmas specials like Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer and The Year Without a Santa Claus.

So an image coalesced in my mind: young Rankin/Bass Hobbit-style wood elves are engaged in some Rankin/Bass Christmas elf style shenanigans (a yarn duel) and King Thranduil is giving them a good talking-to.

Since I only had a rough memory of what Thranduil looked like I tried a few practice sketches to see what I could make work.

Then I did my final doodle:

Which I cleaned up a bit in GIMP:

(I was originally going to throw in some Christmas decorations in the background to cover all the bases, but as I was drawing I figured it's good enough that Thranduil himself has been "decorated" with a strand of yarn that's hooked over his ear).