Ugh. The trees. In my initial concepts, I had planned to do much more alien-looking trees and thought it would be cool to have clump-circles where a single big “spine” tree would grow in the center, surrounded by a ring of smaller trees that grow lateral, flying buttress-like branches to support the main tree, which would need support to carry its snow load. As it turned out, I decided that rings of trees would get really thick in the art and it would be hard to space multiple rings out enough to clearly show the characters in the scenes. So I opted for singular trees instead.

To make them a little more alien, I went with the twisty trunks, with the idea that a couple trees would grow together and intertwine for support (again, I was thinking about the snowload the trees would have to carry on this planet). Ultimately, I’m not crazy about the tree designs as I think they could have been more visually interesting, even if they had just been a bit thicker or more twisty and intertwined, but there you go.

This page marks the start of the nighttime sequence, and I obviously made heavy use of blue overlay tints to enhance the mood and setting. I think it came out well, and I also found it helpful to slightly erase (or mask) the overlay in certain areas to lighten the blue and let the underlying colors show through. I did this to accent specific elements that I wanted readers’ eyes to be drawn to, with the technique being a bit more apparent in the following pages.