The Amulet - Part 2 Detailing

Final Pass

Adjustment Pass

 

During detailing I switched played around with the Pencil tool and tweaking opacity and size to push the color around. 
I used the liquify tool to adjust parts of the painting that needed to be moved around.

The Painterly Blender is used on everything at a small size and I use it to either get rid of the hard edges of the color transitions created by the pencil, or to soften a shape edge.

Edges: I thought carefully where I wanted hard edges, soft edges and lost edges. The front skeleton and the background one have been left rough. This contrasts with the more polished central figures. I wanted the focal point to be the knight and the sorceress, so I spent most time just polishing them. 
On the skin of the sorceress I used the normal blender as it is softer and though it flattens the color, the blending becomes entirely smooth. By using it at a small size I can keep the color variation but blend the color together while hiding the brush strokes.
Since there is no outline edges are created by contrast in either value or color. The sharpness of an edge is created by layering smaller and smaller brushstrokes that turn into a sharp change. 

One quirk of this painting is that until the very end I was not happy with the skeleton interacting with the sorceress, So I blacked out that area and completely repainted it from scratch directly in color, without going through the black and white pass first. I hope that one day I will be able to paint directly in color like that.