A few years ago I made Starry isles, which I like a lot mainly due to its very pleasant fantasy mood that is so otherworldly and inviting. Recently, I was looking through the work-in-progress directory of that image and the idea came about to do a sequel. My goal was to make the sequel even more visually appealing. I started by doing a sketch, shown here at the bottom of the sketchbook page.



As is usually the case with my workflow, the initial idea evolves a lot as I work on it. So what I have initially imagined may be quite different from the actual sketch, and the final artwork may also be different from the sketch. This is partly because sketching is a brief process. Thus I can draw many sketches that explore the initial idea and produce different visual variations of it in a short amount of time. Furthermore, once I start working digitally, it's easy to experiment and make big changes quickly. Thus the initial idea may end up looking very different once it has gone through the whole creative process.