Basilisk

Here's the project I'm currently working on in digital drawing, as it stands right now. We have to illustrate a mythological beast from written text as we would perceive it. My creature is the Basilisk: a beast with the head of a chicken, the tale of a serpent, and thorned wings that turns people to stone, poisons/dries up rivers, and creates deserts wherever it lands. I decided to make the Basilisk embody the desert that it creates. I've still got almost a month before it's due, so I plan to really knock this one out of the park. This isn't the best representation of this image. When I copied it to a GIF file, the compression jumbled some of the colors into weird amorphous blob shapes (and they don't look like that as a PSD file). I'm trying to work with a relatively limited palette (Blues, Greens, Red/Browns, no black so far, and minimal white).