I thought it could be interesting to share a few work in progress screenshots I made during the painting of A Strange New Pet.
Hopefully this will explain some of my process and thoughts to anyone interested.

Image 1:
When I do images just for my own fun, i tend to work very intuitively at the start - just doodling around with colours and shapes, with no specific narrative in mind. The ideas come and go very fast...Unfortunately I did not save any of the very early images from this one, but I remember it was at one time a fat lady with thin arms floating around in a desert...eventually it changed into this weird organic building. At this stage it is all painted on one layer, with broad simple brushstrokes. This is around 1 -2 hours into the process.

Image 2:
This is taken several hours later. The image has been split into several layers (background, middle ground, foreground, layers with very low opacity layers for the sunlight, multiply layers to create shadows on top, and masks on the layers for experiments) As you can see the pet is only introduced later on, as I begin to look for a deeper narrative within the shapes. What was once just a stick, or a fishing rod in image 1, is now a crane, and the narrative around the pet on the platform is the focus of the piece.

Image 3:
This is just the separated background.

Image 4:
In the last couple of months I have become more aware of composition and all the rules and techniques that you can use. So I use a golden spiral to check the placement of the elements.
As you can see the center of the golden spiral is placed around the crane, which was moved a bit to better fit with the center of the spiral.
I can also reveal the excentric owner of the building is actually seen on the image. He is just so small you cannot see him on the reduced webimages, but he sits within the circle and drives the crane!
The mysterious red light from the cave is also aligned with the golden spiral, which emphasizes its somewhat mysterious part in the story.

Image 5:
A few layers collected to show all the different corrections I place on later layers, to avoid making mistakes and ruining the old layers.

Image 6:
The final image. Around 10 hours work in all I think (give or take a few hours as I did not count however).

So what does the story mean? I think the story is about being lonely and excentric. The owner lives separated from the rest of the world in his fabulous building. You can see someone else is living in the mountain side, there is a mysterious and sexy inviting light, but no bridges over to these hidden people. Instead the owner has acquired a giant weird hand-formed pet to keep him company in his magnificent loneliness.
A few people have complained about the eyes darting uncomfortably back and forth between the pet and the cave, and they are absolutely right about it. But I think the discomfort between the owner, his pet on one side of the painting and the mysterious unseen people on the other side, is an important part of the story in the image.

I hope you find these images and descriptions interesting. Thanks for reading this!