Raphael, Archangel of Healing - Detail Phase

I made a few tweaks to the content as I'm pushing forwards into the final phases of this painting. The main thing I wanted to address was getting something interesting happening with those arms. I feel like that's going to be an iconic design choice for this character moving forward. 

The wavy noodle arms are a bit of a call back to the design of Zuriel from Evangelion. My fellow Eva fans know what I'm talking about.

It's really easy to loose a ton of time doing details if you aren't careful. I've been jumping around between different elements of this painting as I'm working on it and that always leads to wasteful and redundant work. 

The main concern is edges. The process of defining hard versus soft edges throughout the painting is the majority of the work at this point. What I want to avoid, is to sharpen an edge and then start working on another element next to it in a looser way. Doing that will always end up with my strokes accidentally mushing up my edges.

The best way to prevent going back and forth on edges over and over is to work back to front. Smoothing out the furthest background elements first and moving my way up to the foreground means I will have to address each section of the painting the fewest number of times in order to complete the piece.

In general, I use working back to front as a guideline more than a rule. Sometimes my eye catches a bit of adjustment I want to make and I feel like resisting those urges is going to cause me to miss making those adjustments later on. What's important, is that I try to listen to myself when I feel a resistance to fully rendering the background. If I can't imagine what it looks like completed, there is probably additional problem solving that needs to be addressed in addition to the rendering. If something feels like it's blocking me from working back to front, I'm probably noticing a problem that requires a solution before knuckling down on rendering.

When I was less experienced, I would often struggle to finish paintings because there were areas that could never quite get completed regardless of how much time I spent scrubbing away at them. These days I'm very sensitive to those spots and I know to step back a little from them rather than simply try to bull through. I see students get stuck like this all the time. The trick to take your own internal sensations very seriously when painting. The most productive voice in your head is rarely the loudest or most direct.