Secret 7" successful entry

I have been very remiss in not adding my winning Secret7s image to the blog, and here it is! It was entered for Massive Attack's Karmacoma, and is based on a photo of a Peruvian mummy I found on this excellent travel blog: http://kojin.wordpress.com/ I think from a drawing stand-poit, it's the best single piece I've done to this point. I really, really love it, and it looked great printed out.

As I did for my Lorde piece, here are some process images.

First thumbnail sketch. At this point, I was going to do most of the work to the shawl, and leave the 'flesh' more or less blank. 

Photo of progress about 2 hours in. The first 2 hours are always the quickest... wait, that doesn't make sense. I mean, I get the most done on this type of image in the first 2 hours. I suppose it's because at that stage I'm setting up the rules that the work will need to follow, and so can be a little experimental. After this point, I'll be constantly referring back, to make sure it's coherent.

About 4/5 hours in, with the source photo and my carpet in shot for good measure.

To keep this neatly in a square format, I had to extend the 'shawl' area, but in working on A4 Bristol Board did not give this a thought when I started. So I taped a piece of A3 printer paper to it and carried the line out. You can clearly see where I took a wrong turn on the first go. I sent this original to James Mahan.

Here's the final scan. A little bit of Photoshop after scanning (removing the paper fold from the middle, increasing the contrast, scrubbing that stray line from the right hand side and paint-potting the shawl, then whacking in a very orange background colour) and I'm done.