skinshifter ceremony

(looking at this from a distance)

Is it a vase or two faces?

I had a pretty neat realization that I could magic wand select the lower part of the main figure's body and apply a gradient just to that part, which allowed for maintaining a highlight on his sleeve. In general I would like to get more slick with that kind of thing; it can really allow for cool effects. I feel like the textural elements in this piece are pretty phoned in, because they were - I didn't spend more than like 90 minutes on this. But I mostly just wanted to try it out and I'm pretty happy with how things went. I tried to make sure that for the most part adjacent color fields were different brightness values and I think that was largely successful. Really what this piece needs to be elevated is patience and going over the edges of things until they're all nice and clean, plus a re-do of textural lines. I'm quite pleased with the rim-lighting on the primary figure, but quite dissatisfied with it on the secondary figures. I was intending for a sort of wood-cut evocation with the textural elements, but my application of and choice of brush didn't quite bear that out.