Phoenix Rising

Birthday present for Jo ^__^ It looks absolutely spanking printed up at full res on photo paper, though it ate most of my colour ink... And yes, i'm something of a hopeless romantic...

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Something of a new style for me, and it's come out quite nicely. Though in places i munged up how i did it, so it took rather longer than it should have. Probably about 20 hours total, though a good quarter of that was spent filling in my mistakes... I coloured it as i would have for one of my normal pictures, by bucket-filling lines. Then took them out and was left with a whole bunch of gaps to fill...>.< 5 hours of airbrushing later...

I'm really pleased with the flames. Thanks to this tutorial [link] for supplying the ideas and the gradient used, though i adapted it a little to make the shaped flames as opposed to the straight-line ones it shows. Used a fuzzy white airbrush on a black ground then a gradient map, followed by IWarp as it showed me. It looks pretty damn good, IMHO, though in places it could use some finesse (notably around the bottom of the right wing). And i think it noticeably improves on the way through.

The sky is done with a custom brush i designed a long while ago.

As usual, any crits gratefully recieved, and borne in mind for the future, though i probably won't be making alterations to this pic - it's more than 30 Mb in size and has repeatedly hung up my poor innocent computer during it's construction. Do any more to it and i think the poor machine will be a smoking heap on the floor...

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Overall, i'm very pleased. This is the first pic i think is good enough to even consider offering as a print. WHat would people think to that idea?