The blood moon and the glow it would have thrown on the dark sky aren't well done, and the pencil lines are too obvious, even after blending with a piece of tissue paper and with my blender in some parts.
I had done the ghoul, his pet wolf-dog and their little hill of skulls first, and, as always, the blank background stared back at me, melting away much of my patience. I think I was in too much of a hurry to finish it, after the subjects in the foreground had sat there half finished for a couple of weeks. It was a busy period at home and at work.
The ghoul: I settled easily on making him a shade of dull green, since he's "undead". Again, Rosanes' shadow shading helped me greatly in where to go with a deeper green or even French grey to denote shadows.
The wolf dog: I wanted it to be a dark, dark grey, nearly black, so that the red/vermillion eyes would pop.
The tree: This took a while, with all the gnarliness in deep brown to offset the paler brown of the trunk. I had wanted to make the lone apple on the branch red, but since I already gave Mr Ghoul a scarlet loin cloth, I didn't want to repeat the color. So this became a granny smith tree!
The roots, among which sat all those skulls, took a while, and I was running out of patience, because doing it pretty much restricted my palette to browns, greys and black. The skulls were done easily enough.
Then... the background, my nemesis. With ghouls being creatures of the night, it had to be a night sky, and the inspiration came to me to draw in a blood moon. With its deep red hue, such a moon would add to the spookiness of the scene. I looked up the Internet for pictures of blood moons for inspiration, and built my palette from there. I layered several reds, oranges and deep greys, and left the lower right quadrant a paler yellow for some variation. I had to tone down the moon with a deep grey overall, because it looked too red to be believable.
It still looked all right at this stage. Things went south only when I attempted the sky, especially the part around the moon. For the sky to the right of the picture, I applied three shades of deep blue - the ultramarine, indanthrone, dioxazine purple - then deepened the top of the picture with 90% cool grey to darken it.
I put a layer of orange round the edges of the moon, and then introduced lilac, blending the edges to try to get the gradation smooth. The plan had been to make the lilac morph into blue through shading to join up with the rest of the sky, but, as you can see, the blending didn't go according to plan and just looks Plain Wrong. Because the colors at this point seemed too bright, I brought in my deep grey again to mute it down, but that too, didn't go well.
The rim lighting: The trusty white gel pen came in useful here for the silvery threads of bright white where the ghoul, wolf-dog and tree catch the moonlight.
Maybe I should have done a regular yellow moon. Might have been less demanding and not required so many colors.
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