this isn't the same pathfinder that's being beaten with a staff over his head....

Pretty cool!

It looks very 'traditional media' to me. Was this a digital coloring job or did you use paints and scanning before doing the filtery stuff?

Completely digital. I found a photo of a coyote that I liked, warped it a bit and changed a bit of the body shape and made the eyes larger (and different), then traced that, used the original to extract the main colors and painted broad sections of fur with that (smudging all the way) , took a photo I found of a snowy forest, cropped-warped-overpainted the parts I liked, then took a black background and the "galaxy" brush and made huge bluish splotches, translucented that and doubled it slightly offset (so you get a pattern of shadows), laid down fur over the solid painted coyote, threw away the photos, tweaked and then merged.

About 5 hours of work.

I decided to call it quits because otherwise I'd spend my life tweaking it, y'know? I'll be doing several of this type of painting for the project (and one of humanoid weasel children) so I'll get faster in the future.

Ah, the curse of digital everything: the temptation to tweak it forever!

Except for text messaging, apparently. Nobody ever bothers to tweak that..

Whoo hoo!

Let us know when we can purchase the book.

Beautiful.