DonnchadH and Flaming Mistress stood back to back on the blood slick stones of the Arena, the full depths of treachery of DonnchadH's double becoming all too clear to them. All around, they faced what could be their last challenge as those who had lost their matches bodily rise from their blood, pulled back to unlife by their screaming souls summoned forth from the World Eye.

This was a rather complex commission from DonnchadH in an attempt to recreate a part of a story that he had been working on. Initially, I felt that the whole scene was a touch too busy and, in the end, i was not happy with the flaming auras around Flame Mistress' hands so i decided to push this piece a bit further then i usually do.

For this one, i went ahead and did some post production tweaking to the image in PaintShop in an attempt to add some fiery punch to the fire as well as tone down the back ground a bit to keep confusion to a minimum. There was also some minor color tweaking while i was at it.

You can see the original unmolested painting HERE

I hadn't ever really tweaked any of my paintings before, but some things that were said (not in relation to this painting in the least) earlier had go me thinking a lot about it. I had always just felt it to be a touch dishonest, but, hell, if I have the tool to realize my vision, I might as well use it. I still wanted most of the work to be done on the painting proper and for that to look as good as I could get it; after all, that is what gets sent to the client but I figured it couldn't hurt much to give them a digitally tweaked version of it as well.

Also, due to the mass amounts of not painting that has begun to go into these, i have begun filling them under mixed media. When the base coats and "start" of the work is the only thing that is painted, i figured I needed to stop calling them paintings

Media: watercolor, colored pencils, and india ink on 300lbs hot pressed watercolor paper with some post production work done in PaintShop Pro X