The Art of Frank Gallimore
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In this go-round, I decided to keep bumping the contrast using other tools beside ink and graphite. I went back in with some white gouache using a very old kolinsky sable brush that still manages to hold a point despite how much I've abused it. I strengthened the highlights again and then I dimmed the white with a touch of gray and blue just to add more transition between the brightest lights into the middle tones. 
Then I had some fun with the fur, going back and forth between full and dimmed highlights as well as a bit of graphite here and there to make the shimmer of fur more believable. This turned out to be my favorite part of the process, that and the tongue.
Speaking of the tongue: I like to stand back from a painting every so often to see what I'm missing. Standing back forces your eye to concentrate on large shapes and the agreements between them. Also, it allows you to squint a bit and get a good approximation of what shape the darkest darks have formed versus the lightest lights. In other words, it gets you to think compositionally, of the macro instead of the micro. The general shape I was going for here, by the way, was of an X. The funnel cloud rising from the lower left to the upper right while the monkey crosses it going the other way. The tongue, somewhat in the middle of the X, should be our focal point and therefore deserves the strongest contrasts and boldest color. It's not exactly geometrical but that's also what makes it interesting for me.
Anyway, having stepped back, I could see tongue and focal area around it didn't catch my eye enough to make it rise out of all the other details around it. So I added another wash of vermillion, cadmium yellow, and white just to make the tongue stand out a bit more. It turned out too red and so I dabbed at it with a wet paper towel to remove some of the pigmentation. Then I darkened its outline some more and put the highlights back on it to make it pop. The trick then, as it is with any kind of value-bumping, was to get the picture to balance out again, now that I'd significantly sharpened the contrast in one part of it. So I went back into the fur in the chest, what I'd been planning to do anyway, increasing the interest, using some of the linework there to get the eye to point up to the face a bit. I still have to darken the edges of the eyes and nose. I won't sharpen any of the details of the legs, back, or lower body. I'd rather that fade off into the background and not compete with the ponts of interest. 
Finally, I put in some highlights and linework with white gouache on
the wings just to make those pop as well. The photo's not that clear but you get the idea. Just a little white here and
there seemed to make them much more three-dimensional than before.
Still, they're idealized, like the whole painting is, and so I'm not
too concerned that it isn't photo-believeable. If you look back at the full picture of this draft, you'll see that at the end of my painting session, I loosened up by playing a bit more with the funnel cloud, adding some darker grays and wrapping them around the cloud to give it more character, depth and definition. I also washed in a lot of white around it, creating a kind of glow to frame the "darker" materials inside the picture.
Whew! That'll do for now. I'll go back and touch it up some more next week and then put it up for a while. My rule of thumb is to leave a painting alone for a week, ignore it, and then look at it again with fresh eyes to see if it still works. For example, I can already tell, after having put it down for a while over the holidays, that the eyes are a bit more "wrong" than I wanted them to be. I wanted them to look a bit out of whack but I can see now the mis-angled axes of the face (ie, the eye-line vs the mouth-line, etc) are disrupting the expressiveness I was going for. That's the tricky thing about exaggerating. And, truth be told, I'm not perfect on these proportions in my portrait work either, the stuff in which I'm trying for as much accuracy as possible. In an interview on myamericanartist.com, Scott Burdick mentioned that drawing with careful measurement and meticulous accuracy should be to the drawing student like playing the scales is to a pianist. It's not about expression or beauty, it's just about improving your chops, sharpening you skill-set with which you can then create good art. I need to practice my scales!
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