the illustration that took forever
If anything, this illustration taught me patience. It was a private commission for my little brother, who wanted some kind of scenery illustration, maybe with a Japanese touch. Mount Fuji was an obvious inspiration, but otherwise it might not have a particularly Japanese feel to it. What made this an exercise in patience is the size: 100x70 cm.
I have worked on digital illustrations this size before, but never with this amount of detail. Even with the aid of custom brushes to make the painting process a little bit more efficient, it still took insanely long to finish even just a small corner of the illustration. And with custom brushes I always go in and make manual adjustments so things don’t look too repetitive, so there’s always a lot of “traditional” painting to do anyway.
I have had a few other commissions this year, and I created a few new coloring pages, but for the most part I had to focus on finishing this. I stopped counting after a while, but I’m sure I’ve spent well over a hundred hours on this.
I had big plans for 2025 when it came to drawing; I wanted to sketch and experiment more, and to create a lot more coloring pages. It didn’t quite work out that way, but I am very happy that I managed to complete this illustration before the end of 2025, and I’m happy with the result :)
That means 2026 is all open to new projects!
Ingunn
