awesome :3

Seeing these kinds of process images are absolutely magical to me even watching parts of it unfold I'm baffled and amazed. Look forward to seeing what roles the two characters take.

The details!

I love how it came together but I think the very final step of darkening it was not an improvement. A lot of the effort put into all those details is lost in the muddiness of the darkness of the final step

It was necessary for the complete image's looks for when the characters are in, those details take away too much attention and make it look too cluttered.
And if every detail is very visible it just looks too well lit, for scarier gloomier images it's much better to hide details or just barely hint at them.

I don't care about discarding a few hours of work if the painting as a whole looks better because of it. That's what I did here, I sacrificed some parts I worked on hard for a better artwork in the end.

This looks amazing! As always! Also thank you so much for sharing.
Do you have any good source website you use for the stock photo-textures?
Would love to take a look! Always hard to find ones that don't have tons of rules attached to them.

There is http://www.textures.com/
You have free options for lower resolution images (still big enough to work with) in a limited number of the day, or you can pay for credits or subscribe to get larger images.
These you can use for commissions and anything, the only restriction is that you cannot upload them as they are for resale as textures (not relevant to us). No crediting needed.

https://cubebrush.co/
There are always weekly freebies, it's very beneficial to hunt for those. (the price label will be filled, but you can type in 0, or whatever you feel like is appropriate).

He has some free packs: https://cubebrush.co/tomlopez
and some others for almost free, and I think he has a weekly freebie pack now as well.

HOT DAMN, this is so badass, I can't wait to see the finished product!