Personal Piece Update 2

Admittedly not a lot of new ground covered here, but I've reworked some areas and refined others. Not sure I came out too far ahead of where I was before. Nevertheless, I've managed to get the sweater a whole lot closer to done and I also started those sweet leather pants. This is the first time I've painted leather pants since I did art for Dungeons and Dragons. In fact, between the pants and the very chainmail-like sweater, the piece feels somewhat like a bit of a throwback for me.

The big difference between then and now is that I can't rely on a lot of the tricks I used to accomplish the DnD paintings. The main reason for this is scale. Back when I was doing spot illustrations for edition 3.5, my work was extremely small. Indeed, the figures in many of those pieces could be easily covered up by placing my hand over them. The scale allowed for weird tricks that just wouldn't translate to the much larger scale of a 30 x 40 canvas. In all reality, those tricks didn't really survive the jump to Magic, either. Between even that minimal scale increase and the fact that every image now had to have a full background, I was forced to set my bag of tricks aside and learn all new ones. I'm finding the things learned from working on Magic to be far more applicable here.

Anyway, today I'll be fleshing out the pants and the boots a bit and then will begin working on the background. Next week, a lot more ground will get covered if only out of sheer necessity. As that gets dealt with, so too will the changes to the third "Badass" cover (which have all been blocked in and just need refinement). Also, I suspect I'll be doing a lot more raking of pine needles as there is a rather large tree in our front yard that has so far completely blanketed everything twice with the things and is currently in the process of doing it a third time. Right about now, I'm really hoping that the threats of having it cut down next year come to pass. I'm not usually one to get excited about cutting trees down, but I'd rather see something smaller, prettier and less damaging to the lawn in its place. Perhaps a nice red maple. 'Course that's not my decision.

Sigh.

Well, back to painting!