I had a rough idea of what I wanted to do. A group of adventurers reacting to being discovered. I quickly ran off some ugly thumbnails to figure out my composition.

I settle on a rough composition and begin detailing in the sketch.

As I work on the sketch I alter anything that bothers me. Scale, image conflicts, character and thematic changes SHOULD all tackled in the earliest possible stages... Unfortunatly I had a bug up my *** to get painting. Not spending time upfront ended up costing me a lot more painting time as I attempted to correct my mistakes and lack of planning.

I start the painting when I feel I have enough info in the sketch to start... As you will see this was premature. I really needed more planning. Anyways, step one of the painting process is to lay down some base colours.

I start to lay in some shapes attempting to figure out whats not working...

I decide to start with the warrior. His focus will be his arms and preparing for a fight. I dig out some relevant anatomy reference and start painting.

One of the many bad habits that I have is a lack of patience. In this case I should have spent more time on my sketch developing the arms, hands and face; but instead I did it in the painting. This can be time consuming- but sometimes it feels good to shape something out of colour.

Bad habit #2 prematurely focusing in on details. I spent a lot of time on fur on this painting, and used very little of it.

The palette was already not working and so I nipped over to PS for a minute and altered my colours as well as pumping up some values.

Most fantasy artists own at least one body building magazine... honest.

I add in more detail and start to play around with the mood of the piece. Shifting the palette once again.

I start to work on the bird and the light coming from the crystal. At this point I was hopping around in a pretty unstructured manner. I wasted a lot of time. To make matters worse "artifacts" or "errors" started appearing in the image when manipulating the overall colours in PS. Not sure if it's PS or SBP; but this problem had me repainting entire sections- Frustrating!!!

Some things were working and some stuff not so much. My bad habbits were coming back to haunt me. I didn't like the dark area between the dwarf and warrior. Also didn't like the Dwarfs head...

I reworked the Dwarfs head and gave the warrior a helmet to create more interesting shapes at the images center. I originally envisioned the mage being of eastern decent- with a dash of "Elvish". However his bald head and plain features were not taking advantage of the lighting- he just wasn't that interesting. I needed a beard and wrinkles. I started on what i hoped would be my final pass on what was becoming an overworked nightmare. I rescaled some stuff. Repainted the Dwarf and Mage and dicked around with the palette some more... I also recentered the whole image allowing for more space above and below.

I left the painting alone for a bit and took a break. Sometimes it's good to look at something with fresh eyes... Yet again I made some major design changes. Redoing the Dwarfs face again. Getting rid of the cloak. As well as fooling around with the palette and values. I did feel that I could salvage the painting and so started to focus in on some details.

I finished the painting by expanding some detail out into the Valkyrie, increased the light coming from the crystal and added a floor littered from an ancient battle. On the whole this was frustrating piece to work on due to my bad habits, and rush to start painting..... I am fairly happy with the way it turned out; but it should have taken far less time to complete... I live and learn. :)