Winter Dragon - (watercolor & digital, 2013)
At long last, I have finished the Winter Dragon.
What you see above is the result of close to 120 Photoshop layers, and much wrestling with color, lighting, pixels, adjustments, gremlins, and other adverse entities bent on making the life of a picture-maker total chaos.
It finally came to the point where enough was enough. There is only so much I can do to this image to make it successful. Ultimately, I felt like I was working very hard to offset the effects of a lack of planning in the early stages. This was a very uncomfortable feeling.
Also, as layer upon layer began to accumulate in my palette, I began to ask myself: "why so many layers? Why is it taking this many layers to get this point across? Why wasn't there more color in the watercolor stage?" and on and on. A simple idea was requiring 20x the effort, layers, thought, and tweaking than it ever should have.
So to sum it up, I feel like in this painting, I won some and I lost some. In some ways it feels like it is succeeding, but in other ways it feels like it falls short of my original idea. But I'm ready to put this one behind me, and move on to bigger, better things.
Or maybe simpler things. If there's one thing this painting has taught me, it's this: Less is, more often than not, more.
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