I forgot to upload the December step-by-step (Patreon)

I guess with jetlag, and medical stuff going on with family, and big potential changes going on with Patreon it completely slipped my mind. I'm very very sorry about this, feel free to remind me if it seems like I've forgotten to do something :)

Anyway, I started this with the intention of trying a painterly geometric-esque background inspired by:

https://www.instagram.com/stephaniestutz/

http://ieafy.tumblr.com/tagged/ieafy+draws

http://louiezong.com/

Rough thumbnail. I don't think I used any particular photo as a reference but I did spend a lot of time googling pictures of sunrise/sunset on snow.

The sketch I doodled for the thumbnail somehow ended up neat enough to line over, so I went straight into inking. I don't do this very often (I think I should credit inktober for giving me neater initial sketches and the confidence to ink over not-quite-perfect sketches.

Laying down some initial colours. When colouring this I decided to use one brush only (a square oil brush I got from the DAUB set I'm always talking about) because attempting to stylize backgrounds is something I'm very unfamiliar with and I thought it would be best to limit myself to only one brush in an attempt to focus on shape only, not texture.

More laying on colours. I like going from dark to light, it feels almost like I'm sculpting out the shape of whatever I'm painting. At this point pretty much every different colour is on a different layer.

More painting. I started to regret my decision to use only one brush for colouring about now (I think a big part of what I admire about the artists listed above is their use of textures), but I decided to persevere and learn whatever I could from the experience.

More lighting. From memory this was when I started using a few overlay layers for the lighting. Since I'd mostly laid down the basic colours at this point I think I also started adding detail on a new layer on top of everything.

Started colouring Sunati and Austen, I think shading was done on a multiply layer or two.

Lighting painted on top.

And a few more details - some extra colour added on an overlay layer, then another layer on top of that to paint in the details.

And done! I still regret not having used textured brushes for this - oh well, next time!