Basilist Detail - Bottled Fairies.

Overall, the piece is close to finished. I'd like to say that I could power through it and finish it today, but realistically, it's going to take a couple days to detail all the tiny scales. I'll hopefully finish it this week!

This shot is to show you how tiny some of the details are. My little itsy bitsy brush I use for those teeny weeny details is curved from sitting in water too long. I seldom wash/dry my brushes, since I use them every day... But that's a bad habit. Don't be like me! Lol.

What I generally do to get lines that small, is I'll thin the paint out a little bit with water, then after I dip the tiny brush in, I scrape the sides of the brush on an edge of my palette. That gives me a finer point to paint with. THEN, I block the overall shape of the miniscule forms. Once the overall shape is essentially right, I change colours. Those really small lines are created by layering other colours on top of the blocked form.

My best advice to artists about those little lines, not to say that I'm the best, but this is what works for me thus far, is that trying to paint them thin/straight directly with a small brush is for the birds. You can more easily make your linework fine by edging other colours overtop.

For the fairies here, I created a little body-shaped silhouette, added dark green over the black, then continued to add lighter green until I felt the highlights were right.

I'll take a zoomed out shot tomorrow, when hopefully I have most of the rest of the piece done. Hopefully. Maybe. We'll see how much I can do in a day. :)

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