Verchiel, Angel of Leo - Sketch Phase (Patreon)

After being very happy with how an extremely crab-esque, Cancer turned out, I decided to stay very close to the animistic qualities of the zodiac signs. There were early sketches for Leo that had a golden disc for a head, but that was proving to feel a little unsatisfying.

There are still places where I want to increase the "strangeness" of this piece. It doesn't feel appropriately angelic, if the figure ends up appearing to be nothing more than a fancy lion man. The next phase of the painting will have to bear the responsibility of doing that.

Normally, I've skipped recording the 30 mins - 1 hours it takes me to get to this stage from the pencil sketch, but I've decided to share that this time. There is a 5X speed timelapse video of me going from a totally raw scan, to this point on the Dropbox and Discord archive for those of you pledging $10+ for this painting.