crits: his face looks like its being lit up more brightly than his clothes. also Im not sure whats happening with the fireball - is he catching it as it falls on the top of his hand? ouch. If he's producing it himself i think the position of his hand would be different. *generates a quick fireball* yeah it comes out of the palm normally, or sometimes from the ends of the fingers.

The "fireball" is my mistake, it's a little firefly type creature. I guess I needed to retain some of its shape cause all you can just about make out was the wings. The original image had a lot of them in, but because of the reflections cast in the water (and the amount of orange) it was becomming too busy.

I picked purple and orange because I normally use "safe" colours, particuarly blue and I wanted to get away from that. It tooked some tweaking, maybe it could do with a bit more but I'm glad that generally it worked.

It was another firefly type creature in the water. It was hard to make it seem like it was underwater, as the water would have dulled the colours.

I had been doing some studies on swan wings to apply to the denari races but I havn't got it well enough to use them for illustrations so I used my old method, which I also used for the Tazen picture. It's not very realistic, the only trick is to be patient enough to colour each feather and to give them a bit of shape with the shadows/highlights. Black wings are very difficult though, as it's hard to express shadows..

There is a bit of cliche I suppose...the denari (a race of my story) are like my ideals of what Tolkein's elves were to him. They arn't angels, but in the mythology of the human races they are obviously confused as them. There is one culture with many ideals of christianity, yet the denari themselves are influenced by my own pagan identity. Just as many aspects of christianity and paganism are reflected in each other...ok I'm thinking too much, I'll be quiet now.