@bathyscaph thanks for the suggestion. That combination of simple shapes, limited palette and contrast in texture is so nice!

@pagurcia I love Tom Booth! I've been following him for a while on Instagram and completely fell in love with his woodcutter story. I can't wait to see what he does with it. Thanks for the encouragement!

@StudioLooong haha no worries.

Here's his instagram https://instagram.com/charlessantoso?igshid=y94s8v3pba1r

And website http://www.charlessantoso.com/

I really like their stuff. Thanks for the reference.

Thanks @StudioLooong that's exactly what I was looking for. It looks like Sean Farrell is the author and Charles Santoso is the illustrator.

Hey guys.

Recently I've been drawing in more of a digital pencil style.

I'm really wanting to push this style further. Do any of you know of artists, other than our wonderful Will Terry, who use this style or something similar?

Thanks

This is a really cool idea. There are so many variations on Magpies bringing bad luck. Im pretty sure i'm going to head down the Magpie route for my entry. The poem I always heard was to do with how many you had seen: "One for sorrow, two for joy, three for a girl and four for a boy". And, the version for warding off the bad luck, involved saluting and saying "Hello Mr Magpie" three times.

I've not actually heard the telling time version before. Maybe you could go down a more conceptual route with your character cowering behind the clock, using it as protection from the magpie.

I'm listening to an singer called Ezza Rose. Her song Ophelia is so haunting.

Hi guys.

I didn't get chance to enter the June competition but decided to finish my entry any way.

Thanks for taking the time to reply and critique @Kevin-Longueil. Really appreciate your feed back.

I know what you mean about the background. I've since viewed the image on my phone and can see it's much darker compared to my computer screen.

That's a good point about the dwarf's pose. In my initial sketches I'd had him finding gold and holding it up to the light. The eggs read better than the gold but I kept the pose. Your pose does work much better.

Thank you for doing the paint over. It has really helped me to visualise your points.

Hi guys.

For this month's competition I went for the moment before things get very toasty for this wandering dwarf. I was trying to push the separation of the foreground and background characters. Using cool lighter colours and lighting for the foreground and darker warmer colours for the background. I wanted to try and push the dragon back as far into the shadow as possible so that it would almost be a second read with the inner mouth glow signalling that something lay in the gloom.

The things I'm not currently sure about are whether the dwarf pops out too much that he doesn't like he's in the same room as the dragon. The more I look at it the more i feel he should have stronger shadows.

Thanks,
Daniel

Hi @Heather-Bouteneff, thanks for the feedback. The initial idea was summer but with creepy trees. I've quickly changed the clothing slightly to get closer to what you were saying.

Thanks for the help