This is an early birthday pic for my bro  Susi based on a place idea I had a very long time ago. We were talking about my character Ruby, and some of the ideas I had when creating her; she was going to be an NPC in a videogame idea I had, and this was one of the locations in it, near the starting village. The game idea may have died its death (it's not like the world needs more furry FF7/OoT clones, after all :P), but the places and characters still survive, waiting for me to use them elsewhere. So here we are, relaxing in the morning sunshine under the Party Tree, in a field of flowers near the werewolf starting village. :)

I tried some new techniques on this picture; different brush shapes and sizes, scaling, radial gradient filling, Gaussian blurring, the Dodge/Burn tool, different levels of opacity, and a lot of layers - 55 in total! I still need to get a feel for which bits to draw and ink by hand and which bits to add in by computer later, but that comes with practice, I guess.

Happy birthday, bro!

Susi is © himself 2010.
I am © myself 2010, as is the artwork.

D.F.