This is an older piece from 2004. I've had it sitting on an easel here in the studio for the past few days, and it just dawned on me that it would make a good post.

I remember putting a lot of time into this. It's 16" x 20" and painted in acrylics. I began by establishing a composition with thumbnail drawings sketched in pencil. I then painted two small color rough thumbnails as well as a sky/mountain/valley color study in order to establish the color scheme. Then I painted a value study of the composition and finished up with a pencil study of the two main characters in the foreground.

After that, I drew the composition full size on tracing paper, and then transferred it to watercolor board. I fleshed out the drawing thoroughly right on the board, then spray fixed it and sealed it with two coats of matte medium (one layer stroked on horizontally, the second vertically). The matte medium not only helped isolate the drawing from the subsequent paint layers, but by altering the stroke direction for each layer, it gives a fine linen texture on top of the nice watercolor board texture.

And after all of that I was finally ready to start painting... whew.

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