All this time Nieva has had her wonderful sleigh to carry all her worldly goods in. But as time passes spring is coming and the snow is melting. She has to abandon the sleigh (I know, I know, how could I do that to her?)
Instead of the sleigh Nieva decides to build a travois to carry her stuff. She’s a resourceful person as you can tell. :)
Nieva finally gets to meet the dragon - a totally terrifying experience, of course!
Nieva’s campsite.
For these outdoor scenes the challenge was to make a meadow area surrounded by trees.
“Meadows can occur naturally under favorable conditions, but are often maintained by humans…” so says Wikipedia. My meadow is definitely the latter. I had an idea of what I wanted it to look like, but it proved harder to make than I thought. I started by searching out my old watercolors and painting a background of trees. This I attached to the wall along with an old landscape painting which I repurposed with some pastels. Not being entirely satisfied with the look of that, I trimmed some trees in my garden and brought the resulting little branches of greenery into my studio to place in front of the backdrop. It ended up being a fairly effective combination of painted stuff, felt, fabric, and real tree bits.
This is my studio setup (65 inches long by 33 deep). You can clearly see the painted backdrop and real bits of tree. The hardest part of dealing with this scene was that it was on the floor. There must have been a really good reason for me doing that, but now that my knees and back are complaining it completely escapes me! Never again. For these early shots I kept the white fur fabric as snow. In later images I incorporated large areas of green on the ground for the emerging spring grass.
So the next part of my story involves Nieva meeting the dragon rider, Affie. Will they become friends, or enemies? What adventures will they have? Watch this space….. :)