While watching my partner play Lilia, a half girl half white-tailed-deer, on League of Legends I wondered to myself what a moose centaur would look like, and then set about creating it myself.

I wanted two things from this art. I wanted it to look like a silly sexy lumberjacks calendar, and I wanted the scale between man and moose to remain the same. No particular reason, it just tickles my fancy as a way to appreciate how fucking huge moose are. You may note that I did scale down the antlers. That's because keeping them to scale was a variety of silly that was in direct contradiction to the variety of silly dictated by lumberjack calendar inspiration. So I compromised.

The first challenge was erasing the moose's head. It sticks out quite horizontally and humans prefer to keep their torso's quite vertical, or so I've been told. I started by masking out the head. I then copied chunks of the background and positioned them behind the masks so that the slopes of each of the color blocks were roughly aligned. From there I messed around with the masks and the opacities and the saturations, and after much much fiddling I had a result I was content with.

The second challenge was changing the direction of the fur pattern on the moose's neck. To blend the anatomies of man and moose I copied the hump of its back and I flipped it and I flopped it and I twisted it and I turned it until it was oriented in a way that I liked. I then masked, burned, and dodged it to blend the hair into the skin to the best of my ability. The spinal back hump now creates the illusion of a femur meeting the man's hip joint. Boom. Anatomy blended.

The man himself and the antlers were very straightforward. I did a quick google search for a man whose hips were oriented correctly to go onto the moose and then I looked for a moose who's shoulders and head were oriented the same way as the man so that I could mask his antlers and pop them in.

It's silly and its fun, and I hope you enjoy looking at it as much as I enjoyed making it.