progress - new collabo piece w/ artist lichiban

As promised here is where i'm at with my collaborative piece with Lichiban (www.lichiban.blogspot.com). She rocked these beautiful characters and my feeling is to go in and illuminate them by popping them out the background and dressing them with pattern and dimension. So far i've only added three colors brown, sienna, and gold...the background is really bringing the attention to the wood grain texture. As I finish up "The Inspiration Of Broken Dreams" (posted in older blog) this will be the piece I step into with a new found attention to texture and under level build-up. I dig' it so far though...excited to finish this piece for the personal collection.