Monster Tea Party revisited.

So lately I've been putting most of my time into a piece that I started quite a while ago, and then set aside for... oh, life, and all that grown-up stuff. It's coming along nicely, but I don't quite have a finished piece to post just yet, so instead I thought I would show a little of my process work.

It started with a little doodle in one of my sketchbooks (it was so long ago that I have no idea which one it is, so at this point, I won't be posting it) that I enlarged, topped with some tracing paper, and tightened up. Then I scanned it, dropped it in Photoshop, did some minor editing, came up with a couple of color studies, and picked the one I liked best.

The last time I posted about this piece (back in January.... yipes), I had just barely begun to lay down the color layers that would (will) become the finished work. It is much, much further along now and its neat for me to see the progress that I've made on it so far. The image I posted in January was this one:

But now, after picking the project back up and working on it off and on for the past couple of weeks, it looks like this:

It's almost there.

I stare at the sky a lot.

I made a star map of Ursa Major and some of the surrounding constellations for fun.  This is relatively accurate and applies to what those of us in the Northern Hemisphere will see this August.

Speaking of which...

Seriously, nothing calms me down like being outside and looking up at the stars.

How I feel today.

How I feel today:

On the bright side though... I just managed to post this from my phone. Pardon the weird coloration... I took the picture with my phone, too. In a dark room. With obviously poor lighting. Is that an artist foul or something?