Artist's commentary
Moon Blade (30min. spitpaint)
Was originally gonna give a samurai-ish warrior some kind of polearm with crescent blades at the end and progressively went through the phases of the moon as it went down the shaft, but, ah, yeah, ninjas! :D (Big Grin)
I kinda like this idea more, like having a katana with the moon's phases cycling around it as lunar energy motes whip around, tiny sparkles of the phases glittering along the edges.
And firelies! Why not right? Those were super simple, just smudge tool with some green, swap to white to make a hotter core, then duplicated them all over the place, doing transforms to scale and occasionally doing some quick smudges to change it up more between iterations. Eyes were just a layer of color dodge and small red gradients, then duplicated that 3 times to get the red across through the darkened cowl. So nothing complex, just a whole lot of tricks to get all the effects done, basically a ton of shortcuts. Grass was this generic foliage brush I like to use, scaled and transformed it for the foreground with a heavier blur, then duplicated and scaled for the background.