A Hard Day's Knight (beginning process)

Last week I had a really strong visual image of a Knight entering a cave. Sometimes when you visualize an image it can vary in how clearly you can see it. Sometimes you have to grind away with the pencil, trying to fill in the missing pieces and patch's that you just couldn't mentally see. Other times, the image is so clear that you can pretty much recreate the image within your first sketch. This image was very much within the context of the latter. Though, I did have a problem clearly visualizing what it was that would be coming out from it's cave to greet our brave Knight! Was it a Dragon, was it a Troll, or was it something completely different? It turn's out, it was a Swamp Troll (who knew?)

With the Swamp Troll in place I very quickly set out an A3 sketch of the piece. I then scanned this into Photoshop and "flipped" the image to see all it's wonderful flaw's and imbalance's. Underneath the biro sketch I had left in the initial pencil crayon (this was a good idea) drawing from the original Troll head placement. Now looking at the image flipped I could see that the image would be a lot stronger if I kept in both the original head and newer head, after all, the troll already had four arm's, why not two heads!

The image below is a half fixed version form the original sketch. There are still plenty of thing's that will be moved, or fixed, like the owl, the fox type thing and the frog's. But, I will move and fix these issues when I make the final sketch.

Below is some thumb nail's (I prefer to sketch my image large size and then, once happy, produce my thumb nails just for quick colour test's...I'm strange, I know)

My last few (digital) painting's have been made up from using the a lot of blue and yellow's. So, with this image I want to really stay away from those complementary pair and instead push myself into using another complementary pair of colour's, red and green.