May Art Lottery Winner - Garth Holden

Howdy! It's been a bit since I last posted, owing mostly to a welcome increase in commissions for tabletop RPG publications. In case folks missed it on Google+, Canadian author Garth Holden won the May Art Lottery. His submission:

"A friend of mine was born with a mutable soul. He is an Inuit man and it is
not uncommon for the people of the north to be born with both a human and an
animal spirit. People with mutable souls live hard lives, eventually
transforming over the years from one state of being to the other --
sometimes from animal to human, or from human to animal. My friend is a
world class soap-stone carver and a brilliant man, as well as being a polar
bear. That is the heart for my friend’s dilemma. Is he a man coaxing a
polar bear out of the stone? Or, is he a bear laying a man’s spirit rest
in the stone? All I can say is that this is a real world situation. My
friend does not know if he is a man becoming a bear or a bear becoming a
man. I’ve seen the bear rise up and take him over and I’ve seen the
incredible forms he draws out of the stone. Most of my friend’s works are
transformation pieces."

Garth and I discussed the piece a bit more, and I came to a kind of movie poster image montage solution to his image. Here it is:

I've been working away at improving my inking skills, and this was a successful opportunity to explore that vein of illustration a bit more. I hope folks enjoy viewing this piece as much as I enjoyed working with Garth to bring it to life.

 If you have any ideas you'd like to bring to life in illustration, you can always submit to the Monthly Art Lottery. If you need illustrations executed for your awesome project or publication, feel free to contact me via the info on my profile page. Cheers!