A Christmas themed challenge seemed appropriate after all the darkness I'd been producing, so I had a think and took my time on this one. I've gone for a nice smooth style this time around and concentrated on getting all the colours as rich and xmassy as possible. I wanted to get a real sense of depth with the light from the fireplace, and really utilise the vibrant, warm colours and shadows it produced, whilst working in the traditional greens and reds of xmas. I had the idea to do a scene of Santa getting toasted as he was coming down the chimney with a child at the fireplace warming his hands...and as i was concepting i realised it would have to be a fairly long piece!
Concepted the ideas, figures and composition in my little notebook, then went straight into Painter X to create the piece from scratch. Original size was 10000 x 4000 pixels reduced down to about 15percent to get it into the blog. Think it turned out alright, just took a while longer than anticpated!
