This was never intended to be a realistic painting, but for some reason the more I worked on the boy’s face the more I pushed it away from the “comic” gestural style that the charcoal drawing had been. I do think something has been lost that I really liked in that original sketch, but I am so far along with this one, that I am just seeing where it takes me as I move ahead.

I stretched his expression quite a bit from where it was at the last stopping point, and I think it makes a lot more sense. He’s a kid and he is imagining his participation in a full-on battle. I added another silhouette of a soldier reeling from an explosion in the imagined war behind the kid, and I think that I’ll do a bit more work for the explosions and smoke behind the kid next. I’m not totally sure if I want anything else in the extreme foreground, but after it dries I may toy around with a hunk of charred debris or something flying forward. I kind of want the imagined stuff to remain behind the boy to make sure it is clear that it is imagined, but if the boy is like “6” then perhaps he’s still capable of imagining himself into unrealistic realities like Calvin and Hobbes. And it could be an opportunity to create an element that helps to grab the viewer and pull them into the painting. I don’t know. Rendering a cracked and charred hunk of concrete might be exactly what this needs to end it, or it might be exactly what I need to do in order to waste a couple hours of time that might be better spent working on the rest of the series.