Some time ago, I decided to ask about a title prompt, and one of them was "Nights of Winter Snow". It quickly became the favorite, however, it took me about a year to get an idea about what to draw.
Music tends to be a big inspiration aside from movies and comic books on my art. This picture was a product of music and imagry. The idea came to me while listening to Rush's "Bytor and the Snow Dog." The thought was that I was going to make a picture of Bytor (a concept I never drew up unforcunately), fighting the Snow Dog, who in my head came in the form of a strange elf-werewolf hybrid. Eventually, she would loose the tail and the wolf ears and become a plain elf, albeit with a Frazetta touch to it.
This was perhaps one of the longest and best projects in digital art I have ever done since school. It challenge me to create a good background and a character with good shadows. Backgrounds still tend to be my weakness, but I don't like detailing them too much. This also brought me back to the pen tool in Photoshop. I was introduced to the pen tool during college, and even though it is a tedious process, it has a great look. I decided to use a pressure sensitive pen tool to this, to mimic the look of brush pen work. The overall color palette was to envoke night and darkness in general, since the character herself was traveling during the night. The finished product, as seen here, is perhaps my favorite so far this year.
