Christmas Delivery

Mixed Media

Daz 3d Photoshop CS5 

All stock photos came from pixabay

10 hours

Inspiration: A few years ago a friend of mine did a cross stitch of Santa sitting on top of a snowy owl, perched on a branch. That idea has just always stuck with me. I didn't want to copy the image, and I wanted mine more dynamic as I was creating a whole scene, not just a static character on a solid background so I decided my owl had to be in flight and the image just emerged from there. 

Originally this was going to be a 3D entry, but after rendering Santa and the owl I realized that after I did what I wanted with the piece it would probably no longer qualify for 3D, as it has just as much photography and brush work in it as 3D and is put together like a composite. Generally I'm told these fall into digital mixed media. 

I rendered Santa and the owl, and the sack on the back in Daz 3d. I did another render using the same lighting of a sack filled with toys, and random presents tipped at varying angles around the sack. I used stock photos from pixabay of two separate snowy owls to overlay over the 3D owl for more realism. I also added a stock night background, a moon, and architectural graphics all also from pixabay for the background. Brushes were used for the texture overlay and the star/snow effect as well as random bits of painting through out for lighting and corrections and such.