There is a time for life and love, and then, a time for regret.

About the image: I spent more than a month working on this one and tinkering with it. I used a photograph of Jenna Jameson for the pose of the girl as a reference. The background is a wash of my own tree texture brushes. All of this was painted in Photoshop. Below you can see a breakdown of the different stages and maybe you can get some appreciation of the hell I went through before publishing.

As you can see the version with the bright background looks great, but the image was meant to be dark so I went back towards the originally intended background and I think I’m done with it for now.

There is no higher fantasy than the one involving a ride into the skies atop an ill tempered magical beast whose only concern is to bite your face off before throwing you off it’s back and burning you to ash before you can hit the ground. Yet, there are shamans who can reach a perfect symbiosis with their dragons, the most talented of them can actually telepathically urge the creatures into action remotely and can communicate with dozens of dragons at the same time. Most shamans die before they manage to tame their first dragon.

This image was originally a pencil sketch, maybe 2 by 3 inches. After scanning I went nuts in terms of smoothing and painting in the details. The work was mostly done in Photoshop but since I mostly publish in Linux and got the urge to make modifications once again just prior to posting it was finished with The GIMP.