The Magician's Daughter - process

I've had the idea for this painting for a while now. During the planning stage I had a few thumbs that I really liked, so much so that I have decided to repaint the idea from the perspective of the other thumbs I haven't used. I'm going to use other brushes and methods and do this as an experiment, see what kind of outcomes I get. This version came about by combining 'The Magician's Daughter' idea with a desire to pay tribute to one of my favorite painters. There are Echoes of J.W. Waterhouse's painting 'Circe Offering the Cup to Ulysses' I am busy doing a master copy study of it at present and thought it would be cool to apply what I am learning from the process into this painting. In NO WAY do I want to copy so I'm hoping that you see that it is a tribute and that it stands on its own. There are things that are very different in style, etc. So, this is not just 'fan art' but, I am hoping you agree, a painting to be taken seriously on its own.

Here are some of the 'WORK IN PROGRESS' shots. The first one is just the initial 20 min sketch. The ADHD part of me just wanted to start painting already but lately i've been working on discipline and adding value to my process so I continued the rough sketch into a clearer sketched out picture of what was in my head. Greater detail in the sketch phase makes sense, since clients and supervisors can't see what is in your head or make sense of extremely rough lines. This is a personal piece so If I were doing it for review or approval I would have taken it a lot further and refined more but by the time I got to this point I was just itching to get it done already! So I wanted composition clear, some sense of the values in the painting, approximately accurate sketch of the final.

The next image shows the image after blocking out color areas and having begun painting in areas after I decided on the color palette. I wanted the palette to be similar to Waterhouse's painting in my study.

The third image is just before I begin polishing some of the surfaces (mainly focal points) and adding in edges, etc.

I just recently received some good feedback from a fellow artist on WIPNation about composition and some individual elements, which I appreciate. I will probably tune the image at a later date after a short break. In the meanwhile here is an alternate cooler color version.