[AT:] .: Into The Golden Kingdom :.

My part of the art trade with LilySpring, of their deer-like creature Jackson: 
This easily took me 3 days straight to finish! I have no idea why I've suddenly started to work so slow lately, prehaps it's good tho? 'Cause I feel rather relaxed and not too stressed about my art trades I used a ref for a basic deer anatomy and one to get the tricky hindlegs right. I know Jackson is not really a pure deer, but that's the anatomy I chose for him and I hope that's ok! I wanted to try to draw the front-legs without any anatomical reference, and I think they turned out really well!~ I love his bent leg c:
I have found that hooves are really fun to draw, and that deers are really pretty animals c:
I used tons and tons of references of nature to get this background as "real" as possible. I'm still a beginner at this, and at some points I just took a photo, eyedropped the colors out of it and threw the colors on the picture, which I did on the sky, and smeared it around with the Marker tool. To get colors as natural as possible have been a struggle for me, so this method worked fairly well c:
Once I started lightening up some parts the colors went ape-shit crazy anyway, but I tried
I am actually really, really happy with the background, I'd like to believe it is one of my latest better backgrounds, and I spent alot of time to get Jackson right with all of his markings, and the first layer of two shadings I carefully drew every stroke to it's perfection, so I went all in on this picture!~
I really hope that you like this, I am proud of it, and would appreciate encouraging comments!~
__________________________________________________________________________

I did not completely fill this picture with watermarks, but I still have my signature and watermark on this image, it is protected under federal law and any kind of stealing, copying or tracing is punishable by law.

Art © Me
Jackson, Character featured © LilySpring