So nice I used it twice!

Once again things become clear to me only after posting images to my Flickr gallery where I can see thumbnails all arrayed alongside each other at the same time - incredible how useful that is!

I guess I liked my composition in Spearpoint enough to use it twice! I marked some of the most obvious offenders with red arrows and numbered them to make it look all official and scholarly. #1 took me a while to notice, but it represents a sort of pathway through the painting curving from foreground into the background - in one case it's the stream, in the other the wall. This is a compositional idea I came up with because I was disappointed with the flatness of the original Spearpoint (before it was called that - back when the terrain looked more like a golf course or a park). I decided I wanted to somehow bring the viewer right into the landscape and give a feeling of it wrapping around, the way the terrain out in the woods does so often along streams. I guess it stuck in my mind and unconsciously affected the composition of my next illustration.

The other arrows respectively denote a tilted edge separating midground from background - dirt bluff in one case and treeline in the other. And #3 is a large dark form on the left around which the terrain wraps, placed there to help separate foreground and background and act as a sort of anchor around which the image turns.

I remember thinking, shortly before wrapping up Spearpoint that it would be more effective if I would flip Fafhrd and the creature (originally a red fish) - which would accomplish several things - the friends would be looking toward each other rather than one looking at the other's back, and the thing they're both focusing on would be between them and near the center of the image. Well what do you know - in the next illo they're reversed (and the brightly colored creature has become a flying reptile now, but still a highly saturated bright red/orange color).

There's also a misty grey humplike shape - mountain in one, tree-covered hill in the other, looming in the background. I really need to make sure my compositions aren't too similar in the future.