Holiday Challenge Collaboration: WIP

So the AO Holiday Challenge is due on the 20th of the month, only a few days away. Originally I was doing an elf pin-up but after awhile I kinda lost steam on it. So one of the other members offered to do a collaboration. We'd both do pencils and swap. 

Lake Hurwitz sent me this fantastic pencil he did for me to render up. You can check out his work here http://www.demonui.com/

I was looking at this piece and was really thinking about how much I wanted to paint it in watercolor because there are some excellent effects you can do with salt and alcohol. The only issue with that was not having a scanner to scan and submit a final in time. 

What to do....what to do? Well...to be honest I didn't know. But then I came up with the idea of sampling areas of art I already had scanned and adjusting those areas in Photoshop. The end result can be seen above. All together I used about a dozen pieces of other art I already had scanned in )by that I mean like, square inch samples). 

Once that was done I started in on the figure. Lake sent me some ref to use but aside from that I also pulled some of my own ref such as what a winter lake would look like, snow, and even a creepy photo of a little drowned girl (which thankfully was not real). The picture of the drowned girl actually set the pallet for me. I was afraid of it being too blue. 

So I kept on going. One of the hard things was figuring out how to work with traditional scanned media and digital as they have totally different looks and feels. Another is keeping in mind that the largest size according to the spec in the challenge is no larger than 7 inches. Which means this piece is gonna be small in the end. 

I've been working a lot digitally lately which is both nice and kinda sucky. It's nice because I can keep looking at my piece in grey tone to see where I need to work, and also because I can use the histogram to the same end (thanks for that tip Lake). But it's not the same as spreading paint around on paper....especially with salt and alcohol. 

And here's a bit of a close up of the figure himself that was rendered. I've still got some time left to work on this as it's not due until the 20th and I am hoping for some constructive feedback. Right now I am afraid that the figure might be a bit lost in the overall picture. 

Anyways...gonna take a break for now and see what some folks have to say.