Well, I went for the floral halo after all, and scrapped the idea of skulls and whatnot on the tree  — not so much out of laziness (although, er, that might have been a factor) as because there’s nothing to connect skulls and lizards visually with anything else in the picture — it’d be different if he had a halo of skulls and lizards, but then he wouldn’t look much like a saint. So I’m just leaving it as a dead-ish tree, of which a few twigs will be (miraculously?) budding into flower.

I was going to do the tree in pen, but I quite like the effect of the photoshopped pencil, so I’ll probably do a pencil version first before I go inking. The lower picture especially is starting to look like the kind of Rackham tree I want. It turns out the fine nib wasn’t the problem so much as the very thick ink I was using. I got some thinner ink and things are considerably smoother now.