A fluffy primal goddess with a round little belly like a bowl full of jelly ushers in the holidays and a new year with a warm smile~

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Well now.

This is a picture I've been working on off and on for probably two or three (maybe four?) weeks now.
I started this maybe the week before Christmas or the week before that.
I started with wanting to do a little more dynamic pose than normal for me, since my friends have been ragging on my complete inability to come up with anything even remotely original for posing when I'm trying to draw a character concept.

The original idea was that I wanted to explore a new form for Nagala that taps into the deeper psychology of her psyche, wherein at her core, her primal form appears to be a multi-armed cat-snake-kitsune hybrid -- basically a catty kitsune with medusa hair coming from both her head and her tails.

I sketched up a detailed sketch of the idea and everything ---- but my friends couldn't seem to be able to make out the details of the sketch well, I liked the sketch, so I started inking the picture just to take something further.
Some time into the detailing of all the snake heads on her tails, I realized that the idea of it might make more sense with a mixture of snake head AND kitsune tail fluff, so I added fluff.
After adding the fluff, it was the week before Christmas and I knew I wanted to draw a Christmas tree-themed Dryad, but I realized I really didn't have enough time to do yet another picture, so I decided to make this my Christmas picture instead when I noticed that I could paint her tail snakes the colors of Christmas lights.

Thus began my artistic voyage to research and then draft up some festive clothes for Nagala, while trying to imagine what a deeply Rentelian-themed festive holiday garb might look like, as if making a cultural hybrid of the elaborate layering and patterning of clothing native to Nagala's home world of Rentel and the imagery associated with the Winter holiday season here on Earth.

This is ultimately what I ended up with, and while it was a LOT of work, I like to think the results were well worth it! ^_^


I was sort of intending to draw like a Nagala equivalent to http://www.furaffinity.net/view/25967331/

I still don't really know what I'm doing with shading and color balance and I'd like to have a lot more vibrancy in my shading and color choice, but this is the best I've come up with so far.

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In other news, this was the first picture I attempted to make using the new Paint Tool SAI2 that is currently in beta.

I did the first half of this picture in my tried and true Paint Tool SAI, but as I was bumping into problems I always run into with SAI as I get deep enough into a project, I decided to check out the latest beta of SAI -- which had released earlier that very day. (2017-12-27, I believe) (queue me like "...... : | WHAT")
The program isn't perfect, but it feels a lot more "stable" for my uses, because there's no fear of hitting that 32-bit resource cap that I often bump into with SAI as I'm deep into some detailed character work ^w^;;;


Whatever else the case, I hope everyone had a great holiday season and a great new year!

Enjoy! : 3

_{now let's see if I remember how to tag pictures}