The Image Of The Month (IOTM) for January was based on the painting by Robert Finale, Home For Christmas.  It seemed like a good idea on January 1st.  In retrospect, I could have started with a month or three of paintings not quite as complex.  However, the good thing about challenging yourself is that even if you only get halfway there, you are still making progress.

I started by roughing in and placing the bridge, the church and the near house.  That allowed me to position and size all the other assets relative to them without having to re-invent camera position, lens size, etc.  I quickly decided that creating and clothing the people in the scene was much more than I could handle within the one-month time limit.  I cheated and used billboards from the painting for all the people.  Luckily, there were still plenty of challenges to occupy my time. 

In addition to the material, modeling the snow was a challenge.  Previously, I had not spent much time with Blender's sculpting tools.  The snow gave me plenty of quality time experimenting with those.  The snow on the roofs was another opportunity to excel.  I ended up duplicating the roof surfaces, separating them and extruding them in the z-direction to simulate about a foot of snow.  Then I used the subdivision modifier and more sculpting to squish the 'snow' object and in some places pushing it beneath the roof surfaces.  The overall effect is not horrible.  I used a similar approach to model the snow on the pine trees.  It is a good thing they are not the focus of this painting.  The snow on the bushes was a battle and I ended up running out of time before I found a good solution.  So, I chose to ignore it.

• The artist's eye will never perfectly match a camera lens; that's what makes art interesting.  Getting the camera 'close-enough' is success; don't waste time in pursuit of perfection.
• Despite what the schedule says, modeling takes as long as modeling takes.  Don't start texturing early in an attempt to save time; it doesn't.
• Part of the up-front planning should be the plan for Render Layers.  I spent a lot of time re-rendering things that didn't need to be re-rendered.  I thought I was helping myself out by planning to render the scene all at once, but that was definitely not true.
• Progressive refinement applies to practically every step of the process.  I frequently found myself adding too much detail before it was ready and having to re-work something.
• I did not have a daily (nightly) rendering plan which caused me to spend time during the day waiting for a 'quick' render.  Just the discipline of not allowing myself to render during the day in the middle of work would have saved me quite a bit of time. 

As always, comments are appreciated!