May Not Look Like Much

It may not look like much... But this is the happiest of Christmases we've ever had.

This is a belated Christmas picture I wanted to do for 2009.

It went through many stages in my head as I was brainstorming for it.

It was first inspired while I was flipping through a magazine in the dentist's office, and saw some awesome Christmas decorations being displayed in the snow... and a bear and a Labrador popped into my head.

I got really into it. I couldn't stop thinking of the scene... the movie in my head about a bear adopting a little puppy Labrador, and it became decently elaborate.

I played with different scenes and poses and 'camera angles'... but then a friend of mine, who loves bears, and dogs had his precious dog pass away.

It moved way, in a mix of good and bad feelings. It's great to see how much someone loves someone, but death is always a sad moment. But after that happened, I wanted to change the characters around, make the Labrador a GSD, and add in a third character to represent my friend's wife.

I was JUST about to do this, but it WAS a touchy subject, and I felt like it'd be best to stick to my original plan, and not make it DIRECTLY about my friend, his wife, and their dog, in fear of touching a touchy subject with them. I thought of asking their friends, and while that would've given me a good estimated guess as to if they'd be hurt by a picture like that, I figured the SAFEST bet would be to just stick to my original picture plan.

So here, I did.

I wanted the characters to be feral, in the sense that the lions in Lion King are feral.... but still have some slight anthropomorphic qualities. If this picture was animated, they'd be able to talk.

A good friend of mine, wrote a short passage about Christmas and to set the mood and tell a bit of a story for the picture. The story itself has changed a bit too.

ORIGINALLY, It was an injured Labrador pup giving his father bear his favorite stick for Christmas, and the bear had given the pup a tennis ball. I eventually strayed away from this idea, because a tennis ball felt out of place in a forest scene with feralish characters. I tried to replace the tennis ball with something more naturally found in the forest, but then there was the trouble of portraying it so the viewer could know which gift belong to who.

So I ended up just changing the story slightly, to have only one gift, from the bear given to the pup. Naturally, the father bear doesn't need any gift in return, cept for the love of his pup.

The jar of fireflies acts as their Christmas Tree.

The picture also started pretty saturated, which was a bit of a mistake on my part, so I went back and tried to desaturate and cool and dim it down some.



This picture wasn't meant to be a polished up and detailed piece of work, (and I'm on vacation currently), so I wanted to stick to that plan.

I tried to bring a bit of the saturation back near the bear's foot and toes and the back of his arm.... pretty much where a lot of the firefly light was hitting.

Hope you all had a good holiday and a good new year. :)