I painted this in a rush with less than a day left before the deadline. The idea was an amalgamation of several ideas from the thumbnails I did. I didn’t have a solid plan for tackling it - I just thought I would start with impressionist strokes then gradually work in more detail until I ran out of time.
I felt quite happy up to a point, but I started to lose control of it towards the end. Trying to wrestle more detail in, I painted on top of everything and used more controlled brushes. The end result is a bit soft and mushy in parts. I lost some of the bold painterly feel I had in earlier wips.
I’ve had a play with it since, but I’m not convinced it’s worth the effort. I might try reworking from an earlier stage and see if I can keep the look consistent with that. Although I used a full range of values, I didn’t do a good job with layering them to create depth - so I’d like to fix that if I do work on it.
Here’s a few wips showing how it progressed.
I used charcoal brushes to start, then painted broad strokes using mainly Ramon’s RGBA brushes - I felt they were better suited for the look I wanted than my own.