This image was built from two primary components: First, a black and white photo of Adolf Hitler that I scanned into my computer; second, a forest scene built in trueSpace. The entire forest is a 3D object, with textures mapped on to the objects' surfaces to make them appear real. The best 3D work depends on good texture mapping. The bushes in the background, for example, aren't really "bushes" at all: They are flat planes with "bush texture" mapped on to them. Building the forest took me longer than anything else, although getting the two fairies on the left to glow was tricky.

The figures, aside from Hitler, were built in Poser 2 and imported into trueSpace for texturizing and positioning in the 3D scene. As it happens, the orange guy in the middle (he's supposed to be a kobold) wasn't a part of the main scene. I built him separately and imported him into Photoshop, where he was composited in on his own separate layer. (Well, layers; his hair and cloak are separate). The fairies, the dryad and the giant (yes, there's a giant in there... but he's pretty well hidden and you can only see his head and one hand) are all part of the main 3D mesh comprising the forest, as are the trees, the rocks, and the fallen log.

Old Adolf himself, being a photograph and thus immutable, determined the direction of the light. I couldn't have him lit on one side and everything else on the other. Plus, being black and white, he needed to be colorized. For accuracy I had an old color photo of Heinrich Himmler as reference, and I sampled colors from that. Adolf, here, has ended up looking colorized, which isn't particularly satisfying, but it's my hope that the illustration is so striking that most people won't notice that he looks like an old picture postcard.

This illustration is for a story of mine at Deep Outside, the e-zine of Dark and Speculative Fiction.