Notes: Practice for folds in cloth. Yep, I drew the lens flare by hand. Pen tablet all the way. This one is wasn't too bad, timewise. I had a decent body, face, hands, and legs in maybe 3-4 hours. I spent embarassingly long fiddling with the lens flare though. It's much easier to mock up the effects on a flattened image because dodge works on all the layers at once. Plus, a mostly translucent fog becomes, when flattened, much more dodgeable.
Forest based loosely on Muir Woods. That's a great place. Lots of photogenic trees.
The title in Elvish is "The Mage A'Shalka". However, the title also has suspicious resemblance to the Russian word for "little cement mixer".