My Perfect Holiday has always been to celebrate peace, harmony and joy among all living things. It seems to be the one time of year that all beings put aside their differences and truly try to all come together. If only that were true all year... This was created primarily in Photoshop CS3. The lion's face was painted using various fur Photoshop brushes, some I've bought here at Rendo, some I made myself for this. Then a lot of retouching using a Wacom Intuos 3 drawing tablet. The lion's mane is made up of around 50 layers using hair sections (that I drew with the Wacom) duplicated, rotated, PS shadow filters added, etc; then all that hair was flattened into about 3 layers, (one behind the lion's face and 2 on top) color and brightness adjusted etc. Then I went back in and did some more drawing/retouching over that. Some of the ivy/holly was drawn in Illustrator CS3 and then imported into Photoshop; shadows added and art filters applied. Some is photos that have been photopainted/retouched in PS. The cardinals are Poser 7 png renders that were heavily repainted over in PS. In all, it took approx 30 hours over about 2 1/2 weeks to complete. Wishing everyone peace, joy and harmony for the holidays and all year long!