Above is a study for a painting that had me backed into a corner for two years. But the other day I stood before that bastard and whipped out a couple sketches. Sure enough, it helped me destroy the road block. Here's a picture of what it looked like before the sketch:
Toy
You can see that I had already whited out some of it. That purple cake once was a unicorn cake. But I realized that it needed to be a red velvet cat cake in response to a dream that I had about a red velvet cat.
I obliterated it, mostly, and painted again and now it looks like this:
This is from the series The Peg Leg Monkey in the underworld. A collection of 10 paintings that take is from the death to the resurrection of the Peg Leg Money. This painting, where he meets some kind of goddess suffers from being entirely imaginary. When there's no reference image imagination can only take me so far. That pesky cavern wall, for instance.
The larger Peg Leg Monkey helps, and removing the goddess focuses on his velvety cat cake encounter, while putting the sword in a panel isolates it; maybe it's later, or elsewhere, a hidden threat, cut away view or a thought.
Art in progress. It takes time.