Not awesome

I used to draw fairies when I was little, and it's funny that even then I was pretty much convinced that fairies just standing around isn't really interesting enough. Why, then, did I think I'd be much more interested in fairies doing nothing but striking glam poses (which I suppose is marginally more interesting than just standing there looking blank, but not actually interesting as such)?
I give you Exhibit A.














(all the writing and color splotches are notes to myself about opacity and brush size for the layers, and what color I was mostly using)
This is about as far as I got before I decided that this was too boring for words. Not having drawn fairies in years, I'm glad I started this to give me an idea of what frost fairies would look like, but I think it's time to up the ante and start over on something that's actually worth looking at.

It begins

After a (three or maybe five mile, we really aren't sure how far we went) really long hike, a shower, and some pie (oh, delicious pie, I love you so), the great work has begun! I started work on a picture of frost fairies. I couldn't decide if I wanted to do a male or a female (hey, fairies can be guys too...assuming fairies require two genders to reproduce, which, admittedly, is a bit of jump for mythical creatures that presumably use magic [for flying, at the very least, given their tiny wing-to-body ratio]), so I decided to do both. Behold the first step of the process: the sketch and preliminary palette.














It's pretty hard to tell (or so I'm told), but the one on the left is the dude. I figured fairies probably aren't too butch. Butch doesn't seem very aerodynamic.

Fairies are kind of weird

Clearly a frost sprite would have moth wings. It stands to reason. Because of...totally logical factors of...wind...resistance...