How are you feeling about Winter?

Yesterday was day one of the blizzard named Stella. Morning brought the rare and disconcerting phenomenon known as thundersnow. I’ve been tied to my work in recent weeks, however, so the change in the weather mainly just made it prettier and much quieter (barring the thunder) out my windows.

Here’s an illustration I started and finished for a client project yesterday. Silly me, I thought I could whip out some birch trees in an hour or two, but I got pretty granular with the detail, and wound up finishing it in three rounds of perhaps 1.5 hours each, give or take.

Below is the version I’m using for the album. It’s the backdrop of the inner sleeves, so it was silly perhaps to choose something so detailed, but it looks  more serene after decreasing contrast and adding the blue-grey in Photoshop for the final art.