Finding a place for the night...

(original image, made in Krita)

---

Finding a place for the night.

After a long day of traveling, through different landscapes and mushy weather, he finally found a city not far of. The buildings towering high in the evening light. With relieve he mused: 'Ah, tonight we can rest in peace and comfort. They surely have a place to stay with good food and a mighty fine ale'. His mule, often standing in stables with other traveling horses, had heard stories though. Stories about this place... Stories about the many that went there, because it was so inviting after a long and wary travel. But, no one had ever 'been there'. There were no stories of horses (or people) that had actually been to the city. So rumours were many, but nobody knew what was going on....

So, of course, his mule was not to be convinced....

---

The making of:

This time I wanted to try my hand at a different technique of starting an image: To just start making a mess on the canvas and then find structure in that. Let the mess lead me to ideas. After creating a mess, slowly an image started to 'appear':

While painting, the storyline started to fall in place and I had to change the guy leading his horse into the guy pulling his mule that resists.
The structure I tried to implement has 3 focal areas as shown:

with the following flow structure to keep your eye in the image and be lead through the focal areas:

Which led to the final image:

Thanks for reading. Comments & critiques are always welcome!