I paint the rock back in, this time with a more neutral colour, as I think the blue I used before was over saturated. The previous rock had lost it's 'flow' ( shown with the arrows earlier ) as I added details, so I'm careful to try and re-emphasize that as I work. As elsewhere, I'm working from broad, soft strokes and refining with smaller, harder marks. The basic rock is painted against the dark base colour using just two tones.
Now I have to tackle the problem of what the demon is doing up there on the rock again. The skulls didn't work because they didn't add anything to the picture - I want something that will help communicate the character's evil personality and suggest some kind of narrative. Perhaps wanton destruction of something beautiful, delicate and innocent? The idea of a spiteful child pulling the wings off insects pops into my head, so I decide to have him perched up there catching birds and I paint the hand back in as a fist.
Birds :
Here I'm painting in the birds - following the same technique of working from dark to light, first roughly defining the shape of the dead birds on the rock with a dark colour, then laying down a mid tone to add some form with a final round of highlights on top. I want them to stay quite loosely rendered so as not to pull focus from the demon's face and hand.I've purposely hidden most of that unlucky bird inside the demon's fist so as not to make the painting too graphic, and hopefully lend a little ambiguity to the scene - the idea being that the image will reveal itself more slowly if the viewer has to notice the other, more obvious birds in the scene before realising that the bunches of feathers protruding from the hand belong to an unfortunate dove being crushed within the fist.
Tidying Up :
Almost done. I'm much happier with the birds than I was with the skulls, so I'm just working around the painting picking away at any areas that still bother me. I paint in the flying birds in the background, keeping them very simple, add a few highlights to the demon's fist and work into the rock a little more.
