"To the Gates of Hell" Final Color Hi-Res

Today, I have the final color for our Classic Fantasy Illustration for August for you! To The Gates of Hell.

First though: We're postponing this morning's Twitch Stream to tonight at 7PM EST! I'll tell the story about why during the stream. Now back to the image:

The image had a lot of changes as we moved through the process of painting it. In the drawing you can see a lot of these changes. 

Most importantly, the angle was placed beyond the fallen demons, and the horizon line was made to obscure the bottom of the angel's feet.  This helps establish scale in a more dramatic way, than if I had left it looking down. The image was zoomed out a bit to give it some breathing space on the side.  We also altered and reworked some of the pose of the slain demon on the left. 

The axe and the position of his hand just kept tripping me up, so I ended up flipping the hand over, and placing the weapon on top of the limp hand, instead of underneath it, and that seemed to fix a lot of the trouble. 

I also ended up opening the eyes of both figures. This was a hard decision and one I am still torn over. With the eyes closed, the action could have been interpreted like the demons had been put to sleep through some spell, allowing for a non-violent interpretation of the image (our angel put all their upgrade points into a stealth build!). But in the end, it just lacked the heavy metal vibe we were going for, and I decided to paint them with eyes open and unfocused, clearly knocked out. Full-on SMITED. Adding them as bright ice blue eyes also allowed for a nice bit of color contrast in the faces too.  

Lastly, the smoke and ash and debris all over the image was a departure from the original design as well.  But that was just because I can't help myself. I love playing around with atmospheric effects!

In the end, this one took longer than I had anticipated, but was a ton of fun.  I hope you like it.  -jg