Then I go in with Grumbacher watercolor in Charcoal Grey and work in the shadows and some of the modelling on the forms to give them more of a three-dimensional feel.

Here I've started the color watercolor work. It was going very slowly. I'm not sure why, because I was enjoying it, but I was being very hesitant with my watercolors on this painting. I wash in layers of light colors and build them slowly. So long as you don’t scrub when you add aditional layers, and so long as they are dry before you add another layer, it’s remarkable how little the underlayers pick up. This is how you get the sharp, clean, glowing colors in watercolor. By building layers.

Next, I have a detail of the woman.

I wasn't very happy at this point with the way her face was turning out, and I was getting a little frustrated. So I erased down the watercolors in the highlight areas on the woman, and started playing with the colored pencils. This really helped, and I'm starting to feel much happier with the painting at the point of the below image.

And here's a detail of the dragon. I'm making this a white dragon, but am putting a lot of colors into it, trying to balance the warm and cool colors to make it more vibrant than just a "plain" white dragon.I’m still using colored pencils in a lot of warm peach, an almosf neutral lavender, and an sort of turquoise blue.

More colored pencil work. At this point, I realized that I'd forgotten one of the dragon's wings. Big Whoops there! SO I've started to put in it in white colored pencil on the left.  

Here I've got a lot more colored pencil work done, and I'm starting to put in the background over the black in. Notice how rough it is here? I'll fix that later. I'm also starting to go back in over the colored pencil in some areas with more watercolors to make the colors darker or richer.  

Between the last one and this one, I finished the colored pencil and watercolor work, then burnished over the CP colors with with the colorless blender pencil. Then I washed over the background blue pencil with blue watercolors. Somehow this managed to blend the CP nice and smooth. Yay!. Then I grabbed some white gesso (I wanted to use some white gouache, but I was out.) pick out some more highlights and add the sparkles.

You gotta have sparkles!  

I fix the off-kilter knotwork line in Photoshop, and it’s DONE!  

Fin.