My girlfriend is a writer and two of her main characters are a young mage named Shiori and her comrade Gnaf the wolf, they travel their world fighting monsters and demons and righting wrongs, all that good heroic stuff. I painted this for her.

I started off painting this piece with acrylic, but didn't like how it was going, so I scanned it and carried on digitally.

I block in random colors with textured brushes.

I don't usually use textures, but it made life a lot easier to use some for the forest floor here. They were used sparingly and blended in.

I painted up everything else, trying to keep detail on the main focus of the image and painted into the textures to help them disappear.

The whole point was to create a feeling of comfort, warmth and safety, whilst also giving the odd feeling that they are being watched, hence the point of view, I don't know if I achieved that, but I do get the smell of campfire when I look at it so that makes me happy :)