The full title is "What Will They Call Her Tomorrow?" but unfortunately, that hit the character limit. Oh, well.

Every child has a place and things that are theirs. For a little while, you get to wander the world and make up meanings for the little things you see. Every cabinet door could be a way into Narnia, every hole in the earth could be a gnome's hovel. You get to dream anything you choose.

The people who teach you the limits, who bind you down to their level, are rarely the adults. They're the children your own age. They point and laugh at your dreams, break them, grind them into the dirt and take the sunshine away. But there's always a few minutes before the innocence is over, where the children who have already forgotten about the sunshine look and envy those who still remember how it feels to stand in the sun.

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This was initially just going to be a "lookit me do pretty" picture, but then I figured out what the picture is about. Yes, not even the artist knows what their pictures are about until we're done. Oddly, the initial idea didn't change at all, but the meaning behind it shifted. At first, it was "Fantasy child that goes to school with normal kids" (see lower left corner under the bushes), but then I realized that the other kids wouldn't react to the fantasy child very well, and it kinda turned into a simi-autobiographical picture. I was homeschooled, so I didn't experiance much peer pressure until later. When I was around other kids, I always felt like the odd one out. I hated their games and their conversations--they were boring and empty, wastes of time--but I knew better than to share my games and stories with them. The few times I did, I got teased, and the things that I treasured would get ignored in favor of something superficially brighter and impressive, that wasn't very interesting in the long run.

So this picture is for me, and for everybody who has ever regretted being caught with their sunshine-dreams.

Technical stuff: LOTS of work. Oh my god, so much work. I woke up today with a lingering ache in my elbow from painting so much over the last two weeks. Sketched over the course of two days, using several pictures of children to get the "look" right. Primary source was [link] by though I did modify the pose a bit.

Modified a couple of Photoshop's default brushes for the tree leaves and the grass. I thought the background was going to drive me bonkers. Too many details, too much work. This is the third attempt at the background. The first one just plain sucked, the second was closer but not quite what I wanted. There are a few ways I could improve on the third try, but the lighting clicked with this one and I didn't want to chance overworking it.

These are also the second attempt at those fairies. The first one they were pretty and shiny, little lens-flares with legs. I had almost finished them when I realized (sigh) they were not what I wanted.

With the exception of the leaves and the grass, most of the work was done with a hard-to-slightly-fuzzy brush and the mighty, life-saving smudge tool. And yes, I know the watermark is a god-awful ugly streak of text that I didn't ATTEMPT to blend into the rest of the picture. That's the point of a watermark.

Tools: Photoshop, Wacom Intros 9by12

Time: didn't keep track. About two weeks, start to finish.