In this digital painting I was going for a photo-realistic look, showing the subtleties of the holly leaves and berries.

The image was painted using Painter Classic and an 8x6 inch Wacom tablet. I painted the original image at 300 pixels per inch so that it would print cleanly, but the image above is seen at 72 ppi for web display.

Since posting this image I've received a few e-mail inquiries asking if this work uses a photographic image as it's base. The answer is no. Everything you see was painted by hand. No photos or other material were used in the image.

Click here for a larger (768x574) version of this image.