I always seem to start these things by describing how long it took to finish the image, so in the interest of keeping up tradition….this one took a year and a half! In fairness, it was done in dribs and drabs – I started Greenspindle, the tiny citadel, way back in October 2008. I’ve been revisiting it every now and again, adding doors, windows, levels etc as I went along. As always, the image is a mixture of many hours of painting, 100’s of layers, and elements of my own photography. The Apple Dragon (spawned from an apple tree) is my most recent Wood Dragon species (I have about 12 now), and I’ve been working on him for the last couple of weeks. The Fire Fairy was painted using a lot of Blur’s ‘GoodBrush’ set – thanks to him for making them freely available. This is a greeting between the two creatures, both weaving the magic of the wood.

The image ended up being nearly 17,000 pixels across before cropping, definitely the biggest I’ve ever worked on. The saves were a gig and half each time and my poor PC took a pounding! For those interested, the original plate is here –

http://www.philmcdarby.com/images/uploads/greenspindlePlate.jpg

I ended up using very little of it, but it was a good starting point in terms of light and composition.

Here’s some crops at 100% resolution -





View Larger Image