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I spent the summer after my sophomore year in college working as a research assistant for a Stanford graduate student named Berry Brossi, who was studying the effects of deforestation on bees in the Costa Rican rainforest. Each day, we'd hike through coffee fields and cow pastures to get to the islands of remaining forest, then we'd net and trap bees. This picture is a bit of a tribute to that time, and to Costa Rica in general, and to the sadness of deforestation.

I used a bunch of source images for this drawing. The mountains in the background are from a picture I took while I was in Costa Rica working for Berry. I realized too late that Costa Rican cows are usually brown. I'm sure there's one of these white ones there somewhere. My favorite part of this image is the vein on the cow's udder. (You'll have to use the zoom feature for that one. It took me a while to find a sufficiently detailed image of an udder.)

I listened to Neil Gaiman's Stardust (which makes a much better audiobook that it did a movie) while drawing this picture. A light-hearted fantasy novel, it was the perfect backdrop for drawing misty hills.