The Portfolio of Sarah Bergs
The drawing was first sketched on my Wacom Intuos tablet in the art program Paint Tool SAI. It went through quite a few iterations before landing on this, and when I was finally happy with it, I moved the image into Photoshop CC 2017. For the most part I only used the pen tool to create shapes and arrange them how I liked. When it came to the background, I had to go back into Paint Tool SAI as Photoshop ... just does not track a tablet as well as SAI can, and I needed to be able to draw the mountains like I would on paper. The rest of the image was done with various brushes -- smoke brushes I got from Obsidian Dawn to emulate fog coming from the bottom of the image, and the snow was a base Photoshop brush I tweaked with scatter/size-jitter with a gaussian blur added to replicate snowflakes going through the wind.
The Elder Scrolls V : Skyrim
TESV: Skyrim was released in 2011 by Bethesda Game Studios.
I'll admit, I went through about three other games for the fifth image, until eventually I landed on Skyrim. There are many people that adore the game, and it's easy to see why -- it's one of the few examples of a truly sandbox-RPG where you can look the main plot right in the eye only to do a 180 and ignore it for ~100+ hours as I did until I took the phrase "Mod it 'till it crashes" too literal and had to lose everything I had done. I still wasn't anywhere near being finished with anything, especially with all the DLC (downloadable content) I had yet to even touch.
Given there was a cat race (Khajit) I decided to make my character based off my cat, Vimes -- mostly focusing in archery as there's nothing more satisfying than a slow-motion kill as you watch the arrow wobble in the air until it hits the target -- especially when you thought you missed.
Some might complain the dragon in the image is not true to the game, but let's be honest -- none of the dragons in the game are actual dragons, they're wyverns!
At first the image was only going the be the character with the bow ready to fire, but I decided it would be better to have the dragon behind him (in the game you're referred to as Dragonborn), almost setting the scene: hunting a dragon, the weather has kicked into a blizzard, on the side of a mountain ... and just ran out of arrows.
I also wanted the characters to have similar color schemes because in the game, your powers grow and come from dragons, so might as well show some recognition.
The character is based mostly off of memory, since I had a lot of armors made by mod-creators, I'd have to sift through a lot of images to find what I actually used. The bow is referenced off the in-game bow known as Hunter's Bow.