Painted for the Nymph ArtOrder Challenge. I was pretty intrigued by Mr. Schindehette’s breakdown of the various variations of nymphs across different landscapes in his research of the subject matter for the presentation of the challenge. I looked over all the different types and thought, “what’s my stake in this? what’s the story I will tell?” The encouragement from Jon to “take this challenge and turn it into something useful” for my portfolio had me considering the Warcraft version of dryads.

My heart leapt within me when I saw that Jeremy Cranford was going to be one of the judges. My brain defaulted to Warcraft mode and I put the project in the back of my mind for a while. After two/three weeks of failing to produce something for Udon’s Warcraft Tribute book (for lack of good composition and other technical challenges that left me unsatisfied with the images I had in progress), I decided to just set that aside and refocus on the Art Order challenge.

Over a boring Army Reserve drill weekend, I did a quick sketch of an idea that I had in mind, and an accompanying thumbnail value study. It’s amazing how having a good composition and value plan can make or break an image. Getting home, I went into the virtual reality of Azeroth to take screenshots of dryads and the forests of Kalimdor for my reference, and the work in progress can be seen in the previous blog entry. For the dryads in this painting, I mixed and matched design elements from the existing in-game models of dryads (older dryad game models had barely anything, while the newer ones had too much stuff) as to establish some hierarchy among the three figures.