IF - Storm 1 and Storm 2

Hello!  Another week of Illustration Friday!  This week the word is Storm.  So Jai had an extra band practice this week (Dayliner is playing two shows in Halifax this weekend) and I had an extra night to myself.  I managed to get one painting done on Saturday:

 Which I liked, but wasn't 100% satisfied with.   I wanted the composition to be a little different - not so spaced out, and I wanted it to be softer somehow.  I drew it out again with the charcoal, and really liked my charcoal drawing.  I wanted to preserve that feeling, and still get paint on it.  So I did some experimenting with watercolours.  First I drew out two characters with the charcoal on some scrap paper.  The first one I did with an acrylic line over the charcoal, and then watercolour over top of that:

It was close, but not quite.  Then I painted the watercolours directly over the charcoal, and was much happier.  Aha!

Now all I needed to do was paint my picture.  And here it is:

You can click on it to make it bigger.  I do like this one - it only took three (four?) tries!

These are really big paintings (the one above is 14" x 22") and I have only a very small scanner, so I needed to scan it in six parts, and then patch it all back together.  There might be a few places where it's  got a funny shadow or something, but mostly it's pretty good.  Next time I will try and remember to keep it a reasonable size, and one that could fit in a standard frame, too!

Which one do you like best?