(click for DA link)

Update: Time lapse video/workflow tutorial is found here!

In old scandinavian lore, trolls and vaette (approx. goblins) lived in the forests and hills just out of sight. If you went out really early just after snow had fallen, you might be lucky to find strange footprints in the snow, and the tracks of sleighs. If you followed those tracks you would invariably find them disappear: into the side of a hill, into a stone or across impossibly thin ice. Then you knew you had found the tracks of trolls.

My Christmas card for 2014. Done mostly in MyPaint, using GIMP for final touchup and tweaking. Took some three days. See the DA page for links to my previous Christmas cards. Feedback is appreciated as always.
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Griatch

Griatch,
you know I like your great pieces of digital art
this one is also very nice
for my eyes I made some color/lightness modifications

You always create such nice cards.

Another beauty Griatch, all the best over the holidays!

Griatch.
I especially like your rendering of the trees and woodland scenes. They are so soothing and magical. And they get better each year!

Well done again!

As always, I love your art. I particularly like it when you put in the "wee folk."

Nice as usual, but a bit blueish and "overexposed" IMHO. Applying my usual "auto-balance" photo tools makes is more visually pleasing (for me, at least).

The troll characters are a bit too centered for my taste, this unbalances the picture because we focus on the trolls and the vaette, and never venture to the right. Maybe a pointy hat behind one of the trees on the right would alleviate this (even if that changes the story...).

"La critique est aisée, mais l'art est difficile..." (Destouches)

The timelapse video for this is now up (see first post)

@conbagui, wallace, odinbc, sallyanne:
Thanks a lot for the nice comments people!

@Oregonian:
Yes, the "wee folk" has become a little of a recurring trend in those Christmas cards.

@bilbo9955:
Soothing and magical is what I was aiming for, glad it shows some improvement over the years too.

@dinasset
That is certainly a different take on it. Upping the contrast this much does make for a starker effect but I suspect one also loses some detail when the dark hues all approach each other that much.

@ofnuts
Hm. It's interesting that you find it over-exposed whereas e.g. dinasset above clearly seems to think it is not saturated enough. I wonder if this could have something to do with the different monitors we use. If I look on my laptop screen there is a lot more blue than if I look on my big color-corrected monitors. Even so I did actually apply some 15% more yellow to this before publishing. In the end I suspect this is more a matter of taste than anything.

Yes, centering the characters is a style choice and I am aware that it is not the common thing in art theory. Doing a quick test later made me feel that the center part of the image look too empty and "underused" (and I liked how the sleigh tracks turned out this way too). I guess it's a drawback of making the image as one goes. In the high resolution image you will actually find some bright red birds in the right part of the image though, if you look closely enough.
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Griatch

Griatch.
I think you are absolutely right, as the monitor is concerned, and you -being a digital artist- have to have a well tuned screen.
I had again a look at both the original and my "stressed" variation, but on my monitor I do not see any loss in details.
Just for (my) fun I did another variation (maybe Ofnuts likes it, it's less "blueish)...

Nice card.

Over-exposed doesn't mean over-saturated. On the contrary, since it draws everything towards white, overexposure tends to desaturate colors. So I may agree with Dinasset.

@mackenzie
Thanks!

@dinasset
This is nice effect. It's now an evening scene!

@ofnuts
In that case I don't follow what you mean. There is a vast range of hues all over this image. The only place where it tends towards solid white (infact the only place where I ever intentionally use solid white) is in the sun as far as I know. As for the usage of the word I realize I tend to think of over-exposure from the astronomical technical perspective, where it means that the pixels of the CCD get "saturated". My bad, it's not the common usage of the term. It's easy enough to check if you agree with dinasset though, since s/he has posted two variations of his own in this very thread.
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Griatch

Over-exposed means no darks and a lot of high values (the bulge in the histogram is way past the medium values)(histogram of left). Compare to normally exposed (histogram on right) (assuming of course than photography concepts apply to art )

@ofnuts

I see what you mean! I played around with white-balance a little now and I think I agree with you that it looks better. I still want to avoid too dark shades so I adjusted things in a few different passes. Thanks a lot for the input! Take a look at the image now, see if it looks better.
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Griatch

Much better, I love it.

Definitely better. Even makes the sun and its reflection a bit more bright...

Beautiful work Griatch! Now I've just got to hope for snow this Christmas so that I can have a look for them.

@molly

Good.

@ofnuts

Great, and thanks again for the feedback, much appreciated!

@Erisian

Interesingly, when there's a lot of snow and you head out into the woods around here you can really understand where all those myths and legends come from. A forest in winter can be a very curious place with things covered in snow forming all sorts of strange shapes and impressions.
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Griatch