“Advice from a Caterpillar ” by Chris Beatrice
5. Refining Local Colors
Here I’ve begun to pull out a lot of the green, while still keeping enough to tie the picture together. At this stage you get a pretty good idea what the final picture, including color scheme, will look like. For this picture I wanted to create kind of a confusing panoply of colors, shapes and patterns, and also (as usual) to include unrelated objects that have similar forms and patterns (such as the caterpillar vs. the large leaf, the hookah bowl and tray vs. the flowers, etc.).
6. Modeling the Forms
For this entire image I used a single custom bristle brush, with a fair amount of bleed, varying only the size. Also uncharacteristically for me, brush size was not tied to stylus pressure, so each mark is of a uniform width. At 50% zoom I work over all the forms in the picture at this stage. 
7. Developing Details
I continue to work the whole picture, advancing the level of detail pretty evenly across the board. However, as usual I do save the important details (such as Alice’s face) for later in the picture, so I have things in the picture to relate it to. I’m now working at 50% zoom, which is as far in as I go for a picture like this. I modified the carpet in step 6 to introduce still more color and pattern into the picture. Here I bring it up to the same level of detail as everything else. 
8. Compositional Adjustments
Now that I’m in the home stretch I make last minute changes to Alice’s head direction, sleeves and leggings, and also replace some of the larger flowers with daffodils because their forms more closely resemble the hookah bowl and tray. 
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