The conception of this animated illustration started with an image I saw with my mind's eye of a crashed plane at the bottom of a canyon. Its details and the underlying story progessively built themselves once I started thumbnailing and playing with all the different elements in the picture.

The creation of the background followed my usual method of drawing a seperate black and white pencil drawing first and painting a watercolour next to it. Those are then combined in the computer and enhanced atmospherically.

The moving waterfall in the distance basically consists of marks I made with the Japanese brush. After scanning and isolating them to seperate 'sprites', I fiddled around with Opentoonz' Particles effect which takes these sprites and casts them to a specific direction. There are three particle generators here, where one has its gravity cast downward, while the other two gravitate sideways. This suggests the steamy effect of water vapor spreading around the canyon.

The bird song is actually a recording of a presumably extinct species, the Kaua‘i ‘Ō‘ō. The call is beautiful, but it has a tragic story behind it. I imagine the bird still existing somewhere, perhaps at the bottom of some deep cravice.