The Elk and the Watering Hole

I recently found myself on the radar of Rewilding America Now, a non-profit organization based in New York working to preserve wild horses and their habitats through science-backed rewilding initiatives. At first they expressed an interest in licensing some of my existing artwork featuring North American animals, however that was quickly followed up by the commissioning of an original piece of artwork. While I was given artistic freedom, they did request several must-have elements including an elk as the primary animal, with a pronghorn and a cougar featured somewhere within the body.

How it was made

As usual, these pieces start in Adobe Photoshop. Because this commision was based on my existing artwork, I had a number of examples to work backwards from for consistency in regards to scale, tones, colours, etc. This is apparent if you watch the speedlapse below, where you can see me turning on and off my reference layers throughout the creative process. The entire project, inclusive of the compositing phase and the time spent gathering the fundamental photographic assets for the composition, took somewhere between 15 to 20 hours. The afforementioned speedlapse below condenses that process to around four minutes of footage.