It all started with a Snow Queen fairytale by H.Ch.Andersen. 

I was reading "Starting Point" by Hayao Miyazaki and stumbled upon his praise for animated russian movie "Snezhnaya Koroleva" from 1957. He stated it was then when he realised that he wants to create stories that bring hope and goodness to this world, not the opposite (he was drawing very pesimistic stories himself at that time). 

I realised I do not remember much about the Snow Queen's plot exept there was a Gerda and Kay and a Reindeer so I decided to read an original tale once again after circa 20 years. And it was a blast! 

Decision to make my own tribute to this wonderfully deep and meaningful tale was instant.

I wanted to capture all the stages of Gerda's journey in one illustration (in chronological order) so it would be possible to remember all the story at once looking at one picture. 

It took around a month from idea to completion. 

First I did a quick digital draft to define overall composition:

Having this I could dive into details. I started from handdrawn sketches with blue crayon. Then I did the linework on a tracing paper using drawing ink pens. In my initial sketch I located Snow Queen and Kay just above the sleigh.  

Here you can compare a blue crayon sketch and a black ink lineart

(I still like the sketch more)

Contours still needed some cleaning and adjustments so I scanned the whole picture and continued further work in Photoshop. Then a time had come to set the colors. I knew I want it to be joyfully colorful. I cared to depict all 4 seasons that had passed untill Gerda reached her destination.

At some point I realised that the upper part of the picture looks overloaded. The Snow Queen and Kay became too heavy and too eye-catching so I decided to cut them off to another picture and replaced them with a barely visible snow castle. After all, I wanted to put an emphasis on Gerda, not the Snow Queen.

As a result two final illustrations have been created: one depicting a journey of Gerda and another one depicting Snow Queen and Kay:

Some fine-art print closeups: