Evolution of a Painting-Seuss Tornado

I am just finishing up an intensive 12 week course with Nicholas Wilton. The class has been a roller-coaster between "I'm Awesome!" and "I suck. Why am I doing this?". Nick is a wonderful teacher, super-supportive and sharing. I was very hesitant to sign up back in February...It was NOT cheap...but I am so glad I did!

This painting has gone through so many iterations and may or may not be done. I thought I would share the journey...

The "Seuss Tornado" started out as thick swathes of paint on a 12x12 board.

The first layer had a ton of color. the second layer was an off-white.

I scratched back into the white layer and added tons of little details.

The white layer got a nice glaze to unify it and bring out the scratchy parts.

Now with such a beautiful background in place, I needed to define my shapes. 

I liked it at this point and thought it might be done, but the darks weren't defined enough and it was looking like timid paint application throughout. I glazed over the dark parts with blue to deepen them a bit and defined some opaque areas.

It was still to vague and I was missing areas of light light and dark dark so I went on a wild ride changing it up completely! Now it is "Seuss with a dark side". I didn't plan the monster...He just showed up... :)