Started this at the end of July. Painter ate the Photoshop file a couple of weeks later, just as I was finishing up the foreground. Luckily, I had some (albeit small...as in, 33% of the original working size) WIP jpegs to use so I could continue without having to start over completely from scratch. A week or two spent doctoring and finessing those, reclaiming most of the lost detail and separating the foreground elements onto layers again. And from there, the background and further foreground touch-ups. It has been quite the experience.

The characters in the background, arrayed along the Rocks, are (front, left to right) Jubatus and Chech with Chaus; (middle) Adersi; and (back, left to right) the elders Nilomai and Rsay. And, of course, Snowy and Ng'rea in the foreground.

The forest in the background was ridiculous amounts of easy to do: large oil pastel brush, dark color to pick out the basic layout; smaller oil pastel brush and same dark color for the individual trunks and branches; very small (1.5 pixels) detail airbrush, two different colors (pale blue, pale yellow) for the highlights. That's it. Simple, huh?

The mountains, on the other hand, took three different tries to get right. I blame the fact that I didn't do a proper, detailed outline/layout for them until try number three. Heh. Ng'rea's mountain is on the left, btw. That mountain by itself determined whether the mountains as a whole were a success or a failure: the other mountains had to just look like mountains, but Ng'rea's had to look just right.

All that said, this now sits quite happily as my desktop wallpaper. Hit download for the 1920x1200 version.

Drawing and clean-up (mask layers are my friends) done in Photoshop; all coloring done in Painter (despite it having made a meal of the original file...bastard). Oil pastel tool + detail airbrush + digital airbrush = love. Especially oil pastel tool. Ridiculously large number of layers used. Amount of time = unknown, but well worth it.

Enjoy my past two months' obsession.

Edit: Dang it, forgot to mention about the title.

So, about the title. The whole Northern Nights concept spans several books, the second of which is currently titled All's Fair. I have no idea if the dimensions on this image would work for as such, but I envisioned this as what the cover would look like (wrapped around front, spine, and back). Hence the image title.