The benefits of being alone during the holidays is that you have nothing better to do than get work done. 😛  Here is the result of the past few days of work:

With the worries of art style, perspective, and animation out of the way, I was able to spend the last three days working like a dog or wolf, and was able to produce the follow early draft work.  As you will see, initially I straight up copied Matthew’s tree style but then eventually broke off and began to reinterpret and add my own spin on things.  I think that is a big step for many non artists to understand, they think that if you are using someone else’s work as a reference it is somehow cheating, when in fact it is not.  Of course I will not be using all of these in the final product to be safe but either way I am extremely thankful for finding Mr. Curickshank’s work.

You will also notice I was able to eventually develop my own bushes, and trees based off of this style.  Finally I created some rocks and the wolf and musk ox to see how they fit together in this world, again only caring for 2D profiles and trying to limit myself to only 2-3 colors.  Doing front and back will be more difficult, especially if it becomes a 2.5D / 3 quarters view later on.  For now I’m going to just keep with this so I can keep moving forward.