Yesterday I blocked in the skin areas using colored pencils and oil pastels. Since the areas are rather small, and not a lot of detail needed, I started in on the detail work last night. Nearly completion, I took a step back to look at it overall. That’s when I knew the background wasn’t working for me. I knew it would need some more work toward the end, but looking at it now, I wasn’t sure what it really needed. So, I’ve taken some time off today in hopes of getting a fresh view, and perhaps some inspiration.
Tonight, I’ve taken one of the images from this blog to test ideas on in photoshop. One thing I’ve seen for sure is that the skull needs to be more opaque (and perhaps have some details to it). I’ve also tested the idea of dripping blood (or red candle wax, depending on how you want to see it). This is a tricky thing to do with the foreground completed. Hopefully that’ll be enough for the background, but if not, I may add more candles (and the pentagram candles will need redoing, as they are just too dim).
No photo update today, but hopefully it will be finished tomorrow.