WIP - Storyteller (and use of reference material)

You've really captured a character there.  Not sure if it is from Lord of the Rings or The Hobbit!  Excellent.

I missed this whole thread somehow, until today.  Fascinating to see how you work in these stages - I think how we draw and paint is entirely up to us; some say work over the whole picture rather than concentrate on one bit at a time - can't say I've ever really done that - others say 'start with the eyes', or 'start with the main object, the focal point' - some insist on an 'underpainting', to be built on - others counsel just going in and doing it without any obvious stages: i.e. they may not finish the picture in one sitting, but it's tiredness rather than technique which causes them to stop and pack it in for the day. Though ten years younger than your good self, I rarely manage to finish a painting in one go because the osteo-arthritis doesn't permit: if I try working through the pain, which of course one does to some extent, it reaches a crescendo ... I get irritable, and exhausted, and then of course the work would suffer if I were to persist.  So I don't - but that's not technique, that's just being knackered....   Now, what on earth was the point I was driving at........?  That's another thing about getting older: memory fade!   Well, I don't know!  But manufacturing a point anyway, I think that when artists write about their methods (or, in that doom-laden phrase, "my practice", as if it were somehow just TERRIBLY special) we're all making virtues out of necessity or habit: we do what we do because that's the way we do it; others may imitate if they wish, but on the few occasions on which I've taught or mentored anyone else, I've said the best advice I can give is to look for shapes and volume: and direction of light.  Beyond that, do it your way.  Perhaps this is why I tend to get sniffy about art colleges - that and inverse snobbery, because I didn't go to one. ....... So it's always going to be interesting to see works in progress, at least for fellow practitioners - and it can help others, too, e.g. by finding an approach one had never considered before.  But the best artists, of whom I believe Lew to be one, do it their way - and look upon dogmatic advice indulgently, but have no intention of being bound by it.