So close I can taste it!!

I'm finding I really have to lighten up the image and reduce contrast before making a jpeg or it looks too dark and contrasty, with hyper-boosted saturation. Just to record a pretty good strategy - I'm using brightness + 29, contrast -13. It's actually a little too light - maybe somewhere between +20 to +25 would be better.

Weird - I never would have thought I'd end u spending the majority of my time doing the bluff over and over - but that's how it went. And that was possibly the most important learning experience as well - I ended up with something very much likeFrazetta's swirling colorful mist (quite by accident really). I had some really awesome looking detail going on all over the bluff face - but it was too attention-grabbing - I literally always wanted to look at that for a while before finally glancing at the comparatively boring figures. So in an effort to reduce the contrast of all that detail I chose a nice midtone off the bluff and started scrubbing it in half transparently all over with a really big brush. The results are as you can see - though since then I've added in some colors and sharpened up a few shadows here and there. It needs to have a defined edge to the overall shape - it's really just a big shadow pool like the ones I've been putting on the bodies.

I'm a bit bothered by the over-juicy cartoonish colors. I don't think I'll do anything about it on this painting - maybe, who can say with something like 8 days remaining? But n the future I;ll try to put in some neutral colors here and there. I notice St John seems to use a lot of greys in his shadows, and even in the lights as well. Broken color style. Need to think about that - I actually did it in the hair because after several failed attempts at it I scrounged up some pics of stawberry blondes and picked colors right off one of them, and I found a lot of very neutral greyish midtones - maybe the majority of the color in fact.

Just noticed something else I need to address before it's done - the arms lack definition, except for the Muser's back arm and Fafhrd's down forearm. Looking at the Mouser's well-defined arm makes it obvious how vague and formless the rest of them are. They need to be as clearly defined as Faf's torso and as both of their faces. A daunting task when an arm is at a weird angle or foreshortened - but it's a necessity or I can't call myself a figurative artist.