The court of autumn

For a website I'm doing some illustrations for. The idea is to have a coat-of-arms style logo for each season. This one is for autumn. I tried to stay somewhat stylized, in the way that coats of arms tend to be, but on the other hand I still wanted it to look good, so in the end it's somewhere in between fully realistic and totally flat.

The green horse-like animal on the shield is an irish fae monster called a Kelpie. Kelpies are evil, tricksy characters. They take the form of a horse and stand in a lake or bog, looking wet and miserable. Someone comes along and thinks "Oh sweet, free horse," pulls the kelpie out of the bog, and gets on its back.

At that point they become stuck to the kelpie, and the kelpie gets a big laugh out of diving right back into the bog or lake it had appeared to be stuck in, drowning the person riding it in the process.

I'm not sure if they then unstick the person and eat them, but I mean why wouldn't they? I can only imagine the story grew out of preventing deaths due to people trying to get horses out of bogs and resulting not only in not saving the horse, but getting stuck in the bog themselves.

In most stories I've come across kelpies are the same color as normal horses, black or white or sometimes brown. But since they are sort of aquatic, and definitely evil, we decided to go with a more fanciful appearance.