Taurus - Color Phase (Patreon)

Originally, I was aiming to have this be all yellows and golds. I love desert landscapes and I wanted to see if I could get a sense of scale and awe from sticking to paler hues exclusively. It seemed to be working to a degree, but every time I walked away and came back, I felt something was lacking from the presence of the piece.

Taking a break to go work on formatting some older works for print, I remembered how much I love mixing surreal colors into the palette. Experimenting with some purples and blues in the background started to really add something special to the mix that began to unlock this piece for me. All of a sudden, the path to making this figure more cosmic and elemental began to open up.

I refined the pose of the raised hand to confirm for myself that it's the direction I wanted to take this character. Settling on that choice made me realize I wanted the other hand to counter balance it in a significant way. That lead me to giving him a hammer to grip in order to counterbalance the calming expression of the main hand.

Keeping the the value structure working in this piece with this color scheme has been a balancing act. I want to let the upper part of the body fade away to show scale, but I don't want to become hard to read. Which is a real problem when I'm matting the figure against a dark background. If it was a bright sky, I could just make the head and shoulders a dark silhouette against. Having it against the dark sky is going to require digging up some old tricks to get to work right.