Commissioned by  gryfalcon at AC2016, yes this one took awhile. I had a three-way commission collision with characters I hadn't done before, with rather detailed descriptions. The theme for this one was the commissioner's character visits the world/continuity of the artist's characters. Normally that'd be cool beans--I designed my cast to be able to interact with the characters of others. This one was a little...exotic, shall we say. Since my characters' world didn't contain any of the elements common to other pics of his 'visits', I had to think up something clever.

And the result was this, concentrating on the exact method by which Gryphon Ex Nihilus' appeared in my world. Hurled through a portal by whatever he was doing in the last world, only to crash into a bus shelter right in front of Cynthia, who was deep in the midst of a game of Pokemon GO. Startled, her first reaction was "Should I throw pokeball?"..until a couple of seconds later when it occurred to her that she wasn't looking at her phone when he showed up. What happens next is anyone's guess...

"I only thought this out so far, and...well...the thinking stopped"
--Day Z. Kutter, The Terrible Thunderlizards

Technical:
I decided early on that this was going to have to be a night scene, so that the portal and its associated lighting effects would stand out. Trouble is, I've been out of practice with night scenes. (Oddly enough, Cynthia has starred in virtually all of the ones I've done). What it came down to was an overall shadow layer of dark blue in Screen mode (lighter-than-black colors are increasingly transparent), and airbrushing the elements that were not in shadow--over and above the shadowing and highlighting already present. But there was a hidden spanner in the works that I did not notice early on because of that three-way commission collision.

In the chaos of juggling three commissions, I didn't notice that this image was a little oversized. Between doing and then re-drawing the backdrop in SketchUp and Inkscape, I wound up exporting a pic I thought was 1920x1080, but was actually 7373x3920...the largest image I've ever worked on. Because I was well into the color phase when I noticed this, I couldn't really start over. The file size kept growing with successive effects layers until it finally topped out at 710MB. Probably not such a big deal if I had used a modern image editor. But I did the colors with my 1998-vintage Picture Publisher, which got so bogged down updating its layer thumbnails with each operation (as much as 2 seconds each) that I had to turn off that display to do any work between switching layers (which I had to do a lot of). Finally I got far enough with the effects that I was able to slug it out over the first weekend of the New Year and bring it to completion. A real nose-to-the grindstone effort--(example: all those bits of broken glass on the ground were drawn out individually as masks with no copy-paste assistance)

Pencil on bristol, vector-inked in Inkscape, backdrop drawn in SketchUp, colored in Micrografx Picture Publisher 10. Nine layers excluding attribution text, 710MB in Picture Publisher file format, 84.6MB as a single-layer bitmap.