dizzojay | Snowflake Challenge 2026

Talk about your creative process.

My main creativity at the moment is art. I work in pastel pencils and my process, such as it is, is as follows:

First of all I decide what I'm going to draw. Now, this might be driven by a commission,or it might be that I've got a convention coming up and I want to create something for signing, or it might be that I'm just randomly inspired to draw something to put on my stall and sell.

My next step is to look out reference pictures. If it's a commission, I would have already asked for photos of the person/pet, so I will look through these and decide which one/s to use.

If it's for a convention, I'll trawl the internet for pictures of the character that I want to draw until I find one that I like.

If it's a random picture, a reference might not be necessary, as in these cases I often work from imagination, but in some cases I still like a reference picture.

Once I have the idea and the reference picture, then I sort out the pencils that I'm going use, and the paper that I'm going to work on. I love working on black paper, and when I draw my convention portraits and my stall pictures, I am, in effect my own client, so I can choose black paper as my preference. However, when I do commissions, my client is someone else and I have to accept that black is probably not their preference so I tend to stick to very neutral colours such as grey, cream or sand.

Then I draw the picture.

And that's about it as far as a process goes!

Here are a few examples:

This was a commission, so taken directly from reference photos and drawn on pale grey Ingres paper.

This picture of Frodo was drawn for a convention last year for Elijah Wood to sign. This was drawn from a reference picture.

There was no reference photo involved in this picture, this was drawn for my stall and is now sold.

This Pegasus picture was also drawn from imagination, however, I did refer to pictures so that I could incorporate the Pegasus constellation into it, so I had to check what that looked like correctly!