Dryad, a poster illustration for the Geek Faeries Festival.

28 may 2026

While I said I was stopping taking comissions in 2026, I made a small unique exception for this year's poster of the Geek Faeries Festival. I had full artistic freedom on this one with feedback and guidance by Naya, who is in charge of the festival. So I went digital painting with an artwork showing a dryad, silver hair and leaf-tipped ears in a sunlit forest. Also living vines curl around her shoulders and torso and a small purple bird perches on her shoulder. Golden grass gives a good saturation boost in the yellow in the background.

I painted this huge 3899×5476px format in Krita on Wayland and kept the brushstrokes visible. I also decided to use my old fantasy style, the one I had around 2010 when I was living of freelance fantasy book-cover and board game illustration among other things (before my involvement in the Blender Open Movies, and way before Pepper&Carrot).

The festival who commissioned the piece agreed to an open license and sharing the source 💜. The artwork is released under CC BY-SA and full Krita sources with layers are available here.

Meet me at the festival!

I will be at the Festival, in the castle of Selles-sur-Cher, France, on 12, 13 and 14 June 2026. The festival will sell the poster, and I'll paint a demo live with a video projector connected to my laptop and drawing tablet, at night.

I'll also prepare a little presentation about the weekly making of for the MiniFantasyTheater comic strip.

I will also run a comic-strip workshop: back to the fundamental with only pencil and eraser, with an accent on the storytelling part and layout rather than the drawing technique. Book your reservation at the festival entrance for the workshop, the sit under the tent are limited.

More information: https://www.geekfaeries.fr/

Timelapse video

Unfortunately, I know that since many genAI were trained on artworks of me in that era, many will think when seeing this one "This is AI!" ... and yep, I still receive comments like this on a weekly basis. Anyway, I will not self censor myself and stop using painting my fantasy style just because some billionaires were too poor in skill and soul they had to invent a software that could steal that from me and other artists of the web.

Anyway, here is a timelapse I recorded of the full process, including the first three proposition sketched:

Close up

I worked a lot on the values so the shapes read quickly from a distance. Up close, I kept the brushwork a mess: no smudging, no smoothing and with sometime little surges of saturation colored accent. See the close-up: