I seem to be gaining a bad habit of starting pieces of artwork and not finishing them since I've not made any progress on that wolf image thing since the last time I posted about it here. So instead of working on that, I ended up browsing through some of my art folders and found a rather scribbly something I started months ago, but never tried to finish. It was something I forgot about after dismissing as a 'lost cause' since it would require a lot of patience from me to actually refine it enough to make it into a finished image.

Anyway, I opened it in Photoshop, enlarged it (it was just a low-resolution JPEG), and made a new layer on which I'd paint over it, slowly refining it until maybe one day it could be considered finished. Here's what I have so far:



I've been slowly refining that creature standing on the bridge, the bridge itself, the rocks and water below the bridge, and have also started adding tree branches. Oh, and those lanterns weren't there in the original version. So yes. This is all on two layers in Photoshop, one for the low-resolution original image and another for everything I've started adding today!

Edit: And, slowly but surely, it's coming along:



It's turning out better than I expected it to! Which is nice. It's uh... interesting and rather confusing trying to get the lighting right with this since there are two lanterns shining yellow light on the creature in the middle, the sky is shining its light on the creature, there's red light reflecting off the bridge onto the creatures legs and belly...! And I have to worry about green light on all the stones from the grass and blue light on everything around the water and... and... I don't even know how I'm going to do the leaves of the trees. I'm worried about that bit since I know from experience that I'm uh... really not very good at making trees look good.

All this is, as I probably already said, on a single layer (well, all my additions to the original, vague, scribbly JPEG which is on its own separate layer), so it's a bit difficult painting the parts of the sky that are around the trees. At least I haven't done much detailing on the trees though so I don't have to worry about losing any precious work on them if I DO paint over them a bit.

I feel like I should be taking some close-up screenshot things that I could use to make a 'painting without lines' tutorial, though I'm not sure what I'd even SAY in a tutorial like that other than "don't worry about painting over things. If you painted it once, you can do it again!" or uh... something. o_O

Edit 2: More progress!1 Even though it doesn't really look like I've done much since the last one.



I'm not quite satisfied with the water yet and still have some sparkly bits to add to that... I'm not sure if I'll keep it swirly or not. I also went to all the trouble of drawing wood grain on that bridge, but you can't even see it when it's zoomed out! I also refined that lantern on the left!1 I might attach some ribbons to those lanterns and have them flap gently in the breeze, then add some falling leaves that follow the breeze as well... I might also add sparkly, glowy, floaty things coming out of the water or something!!121 Though that might be too much... I don't know. Either way, this is taking a while!

Edit 3: And the last one before I go to bed:



All my lovely little rock details are completely destroyed by the shrunken image! I should uh... post detail shots of things like that! Yes!1