Midnight Escape - in progress

This one is causing me some grief, but it's a process.  The Painter file I'm working on now actually looks quite different from this rough.  I stretched out the composition to landscape view, and added major contrast.  It's a mess with the architecture though, so I've got black lines crisscrossing everywhere - and while I like to show my creative process, even I'm not comfortable showing that mess on my blog just yet. 
A lot of my work originates from stories I am currently writing or have yet to write.  This story to this painting I have yet to write (I am writing the companion novel to it right now).  I won't go into all the details of the plot but suffice it to say that it's midnight and it's curfew - and our protagonist has to cross the bridge to the girls' dormitories before it disappears!  Not only that, but life-sucking monsters prowl the misty streets below! 

Monster in the Closet

Here you can see a rough under-painting below (painted with actual gouache on illustration board).  The one above is the semi-finished one done in Corel painter from the scanned rough.  I love line work, and at heart I am a draw-er not a painter.  I have done some pretty nice paintings, but doing them always felt more like filling-in lines with color and not actually painting.  So I'll leave the painting to those true painters out there.  They have a technique and style I'll always envy, and how they can make random brushstrokes and dabs of color become actual pictures, without the guidance of lines, is just beyond me. 
The painting on the left was the first painting I attempted right after graduation.  I was going to fly into that full-scale-painting mode I enjoyed while in school..  and then it sat on my drafting table for months, stayed in a 'projects' folder on my desk for a few more, and finally sat on an easel directly in front of my workspace until in a fit of impatience I threw it on my scanner - to finish by digital means.  The process took hardly more than an hour in Corel Painter.  I am so converted to digital painting!