"Harvest Moon" WIP 4 + sketches

I'm still scared to screw up the picture with every stroke, but things are actually beginning to feel easier. Now I know that if I screw up volumes is only because I'm not visualizing them correctly, and not because I lack the understanding of some tool. It was really frustrating to try drawing lights and shadows without knowing values theory and paying attention to things like value contrast.

I designed this picture so that the darker sides of the owls are seen on the background of bright areas while the highlighted sides have the dark sky as background. The sky also gets lighter towards the bottom, so the dark part of the girl is contrasted against a lighter red behind it. At the bottom of the picture there will be ripe grain painted in a relatively light ochre.

This photo is a bit too red, the shading on the girl is actually dark blue in places (phtalo with a little bit of red) and looks definitely darker. I really need to figure out a better camera setup.

Working on several ideas for the next painting in the meanwhile. One of them involves a tied and badly beaten Epona (the horse deity, not the Zelda one!) giving the finger to her human aggressor, showing that her spirit is not yet tamed...

The first version was, uh, kinda like a dinosaur. Added the antlers too because they seemed appropriate, but they'll probably be gone as they don't really make sense. Epona is the deity of horses, not of all ungulates.
After some tinkering... that's better. Without the antlers and with a better drawn leg she might be ready for painting.
Not it has three distinct sheets attached one on top of the other, it's not exactly the way sketches are supposed to work. :-) I guess barbaric corrections like this one look quite weird to people who have a proper art training.