ART TRADE with Stefanie Reville + WIP

Here is my part of an art trade with Stefanie Reville, who's beautiful Yuna piece you can admire just below. Please check out her blog for more awesome artwork LINK

Artwork by Stefanie Reville (  LINK )

And as always for those who are interested I have some work in progress breakdowns:

1) Thumbnail: As you can see I immediately worked out the greyscale, I wanted the composition to revolve around the wizard character in the middle.

2) ROUGH: More fleshed out Thumbnail, I added paws to the dragon to frame the composition better, but since I didn't want to spend a lot of time on this drawing I decided to leave it out (call it being lazy).

3) Line Art : Speaks for itself, no idea why I dropped blacks on the wizard since I decided from the start I would paint this.

4) Since most of the image would be the dragon, I decided on the color for it first and then painted in the sky.

Skip ahead a bit and you can see I was just using a darker version of the green to block in the shadow.

At this stage I still didn't paint any highlights (apart from the red eye), I just changed some of the colors on the wizard and painted in more refined shadows.

When I was happy with the overal image I then started painting in the highlights (lighter parts).

I passed it on to my buddy Eddie jensen to have a look at quick fixes, he pointed out the double hat looked kind of strange, and a lack of something on the left to guide the eye around the painting. I remedied both in the final version and also tweaked the final colors a bit.