[This is reuploaded from ]

1.) Lasso-tool is awesome, you can use the free-form lasso or the polygonal lasso. The polygonal tool also has an override to become freeform if you press ALT (seriously awesome for doing environment art, the trees in the background are made using this), then when the selection is done you just fill it with a solid colour. So you get a sharp nice outline, with both straights and curves easily. Much better than free drawing with the brush tool! Really useful for creating the different layers of depths for example mountains, by lighting up the billboards the further back they are (as you can see with the trees).

I've also used the lasso to make the furry outline look more sharp, simply by cutting in dips and then masking away, making the outline more interesting.

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2.) I'm also quite terrible when it comes to picking correct, natural colours, so I googled up reference images that had the right kind of colour I liked, and then I sampled from that to create the forest and the werewolf. And it worked just fine, might be a bit of a cheat but when you want to succeed and don't really know your way around colours just yet... it's definitively the way to go.

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3.) Apart from that, the image shifts from day to night. That's because the image I used as line art from Leucrotta was named "See into the Dark", a title which completely eluded me for a long time. So... to make it feel proper (and make sense), I used colour filters to fix it, which finally came together before the final image.

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4.) I've also had some difficulty with the environment, namely the left portion of the image which is in the shade. I wanted to add a helping backlight to create a bit of dramatic lighting that is always useful to make the character stand out and just look more 3D really. But it didn't make sense to have a light source there, Werewolves probably don't set up camps, so I had to work with shadows and still make the characters stand out. And to conclude, yes I think the background looks okay, I like the way the subtle colour shifts still make it look like there's more gloomy forest beyond. But in all fairness if I knew some way to work in a light source there, I'd do it.

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5.) I also love the way Leucrotta draws pines, and I'll probably mimic that in the future. But when the detail on the character and foreground went up, I had to spruce up the spruce, so to speak, by again using the lasso tool as well as a custom brush I made in a hurry to make small cuts everywhere.

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6.) The fog is also probably not as good as it could be, but I could not be bothered to find a tutorial on how to draw fog, but it'll do. Uhm reader, do you have a particular tutorial or technique, perhaps? Anyway... I did however use the fog to make the werewolf's left leg appear a bit further back by using the fog, which helps convince us that there's depth. And speaking of fog, I added a gentle gradient in the top right that helps tell us that there's a moon about. I then used a filter effect to make it appear grainy, which I personally think better represents vision in the dark a bit better.

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7.) Finally, I realized that every image you make should at least have a foreground, middle ground and background. So I added the extreme close-up of the patch of grass, which not only gave it more depth but also removed a bit of unnecessary space below the characters that just snagged attention.

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Well... that's pretty much it. Quite extensive project when all is said and done, especially with colour, but fun.