Pretty sure this is now officially the biggest thing I've ever painted, if not by scope and level of detail then by the sheer dimension of the canvas. The full-res file is 5385x3070.

Wind Shift started out as a couple of thumbnails hastily scribbled at work. I then sketched the kids, scanned them in, and scaled up those same thumbnails to match the composition and create a rough greyscale underpainting as I usually do with scenes like this. Did a value study underneath that (4th screenshot) and at this point the basic look of the finished product was down.

I refined the pencil drawings and tweaked Heaven's pose at this point, then pasted them onto a new canvas and basically just color picked and transferred all the values over from the rough study as if it was actually a paint palette. After that it was just a lot of refining with the mouse. My art software is pretty antiquated and doesn't come with much in the way of fancy brushes, but I wanted to go for a more textured look than I normally do to emulate a physical painting.

The end result is about 23 work hours, 3-4 of which were spent yelling at a single cloud.

People always seem so surprised when they find out I'm not using a tablet, but that's how I've been bringing you pictures of sad jackals since 2010 and beyond. Working with the mouse isn't actually hard. It just takes a while, and means I can't churn out full paintings like this all the time. That said... if I want to ramp up production on these kids' story, I might actually have to dig out the dusty little Wacom I've been neglecting all this time.