And this round goes to... The HAND!! DING DING!! (refurbishing some old digital paintings)

Mostly what I've been doing this last week is refurbishing a few older paintings to make them portfolio-worthy. I don't mean a portfolio for getting work - not ready for that yet - just printing them up to put in my own display portfolio so I have physical copies to show people. Here they are - older versions first. 

My manual dexterity has improved dramatically - or the artist's hand as I've heard it called. Notice in the original versions edges were ragged and choppy, but now I was able to get them pretty smooth and crisp without much trouble. 

I also seem to have gotten more subtle with the use of soft edges and textures. Looks like those brutal early exercises in softening edges has paid off.

I was able to clean up the edges (it took a lot of doing for this one!) but I actually still like the earlier version better. Those hard edges were a vital part of what made it work. Now if I could just clean them up but not soften them I might have something decent. Oh, I've been playing around with using gaussian blur to soften some edges - a trick I learned from Camilla Veilmond from her Conceptart sketchbook.

Used a lot of gaussian blur on this one because the background elements were too overpowering. Didn't do much repainting though - it would be a massive job and basically I'd want to start fresh with a whole new composition.