Baba Yaga's Walking Tree House

This is an illustration from 2021 that I spent a lot of time on. The original was an ink sketch that I wanted to turn into a full up color drawing and I did not take the most efficient approach.

For some background, Baba Yaga is a folklore monster... some times in movies portrayed as a male demon. I am Slavic though, and our version of Baba Yaga is an old witch that flies around on a broom stick or a mortar. When I was little my grandma used to try to scare me with stories of Baba Yaga and even told me her house was a tiny little utilty hut between the big apartment buildings we lived in. In the folklore, her house is actually mobile, and has chicken legs to move around on. Also the old crone is portrayed as cannibalistic, especially preferring the taste of young children.

I was intrigued... though I don't think I was ever really scared of the old witch. I just never found the Bulgarian "babas" scary, though other people might be onto something!

This is my interpretation of Baba Yaga's house, I like the idea of living trees that are their own characters, and chicken legs are just too tasty to be spooky!

This little wizard is not Baba Yaga, but is a visitor, and the tree is reacting to the intruder. If you pay attention to my drawings you may see this little red robed wizard show up in quite a few places. There must be a good reason to visit Baba Yaga, but we might never find out the exact cause.

Ink drawing sketch is how this started.

I refined this ink sketch digitally and then colored it. It looked cool, so I thought why not do illustration around it by placing it into a scene? This did not work out very well as the colors were clashing, the values were wrong... I spent a lot more time on this than I should have. Even now in 2025 I did some adjustments and painted in some details to clean this up. In the end some gradient maps and color overlays seem to have brought the image more together. I get frustrated looking at it though.

Of Fire and Ice - Stibnite

This is a sketch from 2012 that also had another figure in the background. The drawing got heavily reworked and was never published before. I colorized it for the #Huevember2025 challenge over at Cara.app

The challenge was to use certain hue or color in an artwork on a specific day. On the 19th and 20th day of November the hue was "Stibnite" which is a grey-ish metal alloy which is toxic. The hues shown in the color picker for the challenge were very blue-ish though. I decided to use both a color layer to shift the drawing's colors to the blue and a gradient map with the dark values mapping to stibnite but the lighter values being mapped to warmer orange and red hues which were also part of the overall color pallete for the month of November.

The character is a fire witch.

Witch - Character Design from 2019

This is a character from the Eternal Seven story. The original ink drawing was made in 2019. Painted over and fleshed out in 2025.