So I decided to work on a “V” animal as there were few animals to choose from and I needed an easy call.  This one has been really causing me serious difficulties.  First, when I fixed and gelled over the top of it, I lost a LOT of contrast… so much so that I had to rebuild a lot of it from the scan of the charcoals I took before the gelling.  Then there was the background.  First I chose to go with a low saturation purple to try an analogous color scheme but I lost the character in it to a large extent.  I had to re-paint the background with a low saturation green.  That worked a lot better and, being complimentary with the red in the head, popped the character out front more.

Now that I am looking at the edge of the fur coat, I’m thinking this might need just one more quick pass to break up the fur contour.  Still, this is close enough to done to post.