Paintings of Blood, Snow and Midnight

Shimmer hung his head wearily, and paused to rest his foot a moment, blood dripping down his snout... he could feel the fresh pain of his wounds with every heaving breath, lancing sharply across his hide. The more deadly pains of torn and tired muscles dragged at his movements.

Around him danced his opponent - young, fierce, bloodthirsty Moonlight. She had waited until after he had defeated two other challengers before tripping up to take her place facing him in the arena. Foolish Petal had died swiftly, a blunted horn through her eye, but Damson had been tougher and worn him down. The sturdy male had succumbed at last to Shimmer's greater stamina and surrendered gasping and broken-horned. He had been led away staggering, to have his eyes gouged out and given to the young warriors to practice on.

And now Moonlight. He should have guessed it would come to this, but when she hadn't been in the initial line-up he had dared hope. Moonlight the killer, Moonlight the careless. He could not let the herd fall into her care - she'd kill for sport once she possessed such power, and maim at whim. Bloodthirst was a prized attribute in the herd, but not to the exclusion of sanity. And how he cursed his lack of foresight, he should have slain her as a yearling - but he hadn't thought she'd be a threat so soon.

A patter of blood fell on his face, as Moonlight flicked her bloody horn, mocking him. Both ponies were bloodsoaked, hooves red and dark, their horns spraying blood with every toss. The mud was churned and red from their battle, and from the great wounds suffered by the first two challengers. Canny old Shimmer had scratched Moonlight a number of times, but she was too quick, too strong, too vicious. His battle-scarred hide was criss-crossed now with new blood. And she mocked him, by splashing in the puddles until she was as bloody as he was.

Moonlight tensed and kicked, and Shimmer flinched and jabbed, then they broke apart again, circling...

He would not survive this battle. Even if he defeated her, some other young buck would take the chance to destroy him - or he would be casually shunned to limp behind the herd, left to the wolves... No. The best he would manage would be to bring Moonlight down with him, let the fight end with their horns buried in each other's hearts - and let the herd descend into anarchy tearing itself apart over who would take power.

Shimmer staggered again, strength flowing away into the dank mud around him, and Moonlight waited, poised, graceful and murderous.

This was inspired by nai-xain's sketching a My Litte Pony at Doujin Overload and AtomicFireball's My Little Pony 1.

When I was little, me and my siblings collected (from fairs and garage sales) a vast herd of MLPs (well, my brother was only five so he only had about four, out of the fifty or sixty). They were all secondhand, and we didn't even know they had 'real' names, and they often came missing most of their manes. We named them all, and knew their herd relationships intimately, and spent many long hours fighting turf wars between the herds, with the successful ponies committing murder and incest and betrayal with cheerful abandon (except for my brother's ponies - he got upset if we killed his ;P )

The unicorns were by far the most prized - partly because we couldn't ever find many, mostly because they had stabby horns.

Sometimes they would invade the lego fortresses of the toy animals and stomp everyone. Other times we got out the giant crocodile.

Blood is so much fun :D

Painted in ArtRage, about an hour and a half.

Alive Inverted was a commission for my sister - she requested Alice in Wonderland as dark and light mirror images, as Yin and Yang, along with playing cards and roses, and cups, and cats, hats, rabbits, chess and ribbons and cupcakes and all or any of those symbols and things from the story.
Edit 22/04/2010: Last few changes made (dark Alice's hair darkened, more tidying) and more importantly - I realised what was mucking up my composition so much - I could flip the yinyang symbol around. So I did - which necessitated much tidying up and some repainting, especially where the black background hid messy lines...
Painted in ArtRage Studio Pro over several weeks.

40 minutes on the plane down to Wellington from an ad in an aeroplane magazine, and another 20 or 30 minutes colouring the lips and sunglasses. I only had tiny pencils, with very few colours and an A6 sketchbook.

Buy this t-shirt on RedBubble

This was an entry for the DeviantWEAR Design Battle - t-shirt design competition. I was basing it off last years YinYang entry, and a sketch I did during a lecture (which originally had a bird in it). Very grateful to my marine science background studying and dissecting and drawing fish, as it came in very useful for certain features - fins, eyes, gills, head shape. Overall was designed to be part fishhook, part yin yang, part water droplet.

You can buy this art print/poster on Zazzle
See it on DeviantART

Negative space and blood and wings that disappeared
and black moons floating in the web of her white hair.
Ostrich feathers fallen from angels wave you on,
and darkness never comes.

Sometimes I think I want to be a fashion designer... painting this was one of those times. I'm really happy with this one, because I haven't been finishing any of my paintings for about three weeks and that was weighing on my mind. And then along she came. She began as a bloody angel (I wanted red. And wings. So there were feathers of blood.) The wings are gone, but the graceful lady that emerged deserves a garment worthy of her... and from there the rest developed.

I think she's carrying ostrich feathers - they're of that size - but they might be from her wings, although her wings are gone... in memento, perhaps? And the moons float around, in a nod to some mythology or other - but were really an excuse to paint her hair that way. And I'm pleased with the dramatic negative space effect.

Three hours in ArtRage Studio Pro

I do believe tis Havelock Vetinari - it wasn't intentional, but he rather appeared and I can't think of him as anything else.
Probably at a younger age, in a swanky assassin cloak... Night Watch, perhaps.

Smooth inking pen and fill tool in ArtRage Studio Pro.

Don't know who the Patrician is? *gasps*
Well, let me recommend to you the Discworld series.
And if you're interested in the best and funniest fantasy every written, I must warn you to Never Start With The First Discworld Book.

You can buy this art print/poster on Zazzle
DeviantART version

Y'know, I actually really like this one. I'm moving towards/back to the simplistic more abstract stuff that I used to paint in high school, when I used traditional acrylic paints - only this time, with the ability to draw it properly!

It's a repainting of this picture on the right, which I painted back in December 2007.

I seem to have a thing for white faces, black hair, red lips and green eyes (Yes, the old version here has green eyes, too, but they aren't very clear) such as for the Smoke and Sunlight pictures recently


Also, a thank you to ~ryuuseisui, who I was sort of colouring pictures for, and started me trying to sketch my own. I believe Kanda Yuu was of some small influence (and that is definitely their fault, as I barely noticed Kanda in the only volume of D-Grayman I ever read)

Both focused on faces, and hair which becomes soaked in blood, and a lot of abstract bloodiness. Also, both are experiments in tools I don't usually use, interestingly - the left was using the airbrush; the right, the felt pen tool and all it's settings.
(I don't use the airbrush nowadays, because my canvas sizes are at minimum, twice as large, and my computer simply cannot cope with the airbrush's demands)

Improvements and Changes

Composition! The old version is pretty much just a face and a filler background in order to call it finished, and while the background has some merit, the overall composition is dull and basically a backdrop/standard portrait shot. And the face was too small.

Canvas sizes and resolution are larger (this one was small by my standards, as it's more of 'quick sketch experiment' than 'fullscale project'
This means there's a lot more detail, and I can actually do more with the picture.

Colour sense - about the same, but sort of composition related, the white spot in the dark picture didn't work very well. The new one is much more balanced.

Movement! And an actual sense of story (I hope!)
She's turning, and looking back as she turns, with a stained sleeve billowing out behind...

Drawing skill
...I hate drawing manga, because the proportions are off, which means I end up tearing my hair out trying to work out if the facial features are right. But here? I have a recognisable face (and she's meant to be all calm and serene - I did try for 'manic grin' but I figured calm was creepier in the end. It added a whole counterbalance of peace to the violence of motion.)
...hmmm. 'Violence of Motion' sounds like a title

There's a whole body there, more or less - indicated by the shoulder, and posture and arm and hand... I didn't not draw it because I couldn't (as in the first) I didn't draw it because it worked better this way as hidden in the background.

oh yes... HAND! Just because it's sort of abstract now, doesn't mean I didn't have to draw it!

Blood spatters! Those were experimenting with the felt pen settings (Softness and wetness), plus a little glitter tool for the drops at the end.

A realism portrait of the guy on the right, who was cosplaying Darth Maul. And yes, that's makeup and not a mask. With funny little horns.

I have it on good authority that the makeup took hours to paint on!

This one took me about two hours to paint, in Artrage 2.5

You can buy this art print/poster on RedBubble
On DeviantART

Don't ask me my name
Dont ask me to look
Don't ask who I am
Don't ask me to stop

Don't ask why I rage
Don't ask me for life
Don't ask to be saved
Don't ask to escape

Don't ask me to leave
Don't ask me to forget
Don't ask why I bleed
AND DON'T ASK HER NAME

Don't ask who she is
Don't ask why she hurts
Don't ask why I drew this
Don't ask. Just. Don't.

And long after I drew this, I'm finally able to write down some of the description that was in my head as I painted her. This is one of those 'catharsis' paintings. I sit down all angry and upset and roiling and paint out the pain until I'm calm and there's a maelstrom on my screen. She's also one of the first women I painted properly, I think. (Although she didn't start off as one!)
People say she's abstract. This surprises me. She does make an awesome and dramatic t-shirt though.

And something looked down and said "This is wrong". And they were torn apart. And now she guards the gates of heaven for evermore, until her love is returned to her. And no angel may pass.

On lighter screens, you can see the bottom edge of the wings quite starkly - they're supposed to nearly blend into the darkness (and my settings are right. I checked).
I discovered new ways to use ArtRage with this - the semi-transparent veils, for example, are thin lines of blur/soft palette knife. And perhaps this love of hers is a woman. And perhaps that's why I was angry. But do you know - I don't actually remember? It was about two years ago now, so I do have an excuse!

She's waiting for you to die and try to go to heaven. Then she'll tear your wings off and throw you back down to hell. As mentioned.. she's a little irrational.

This one's a sad picture; and a dark one.

Part of a random series of somewhat abstract paintings I painted when my internet died!I began with a great black wing and then started painting a horse to go with it...
Shiny blue is inspired by this picture Somewhere in Time....


And I felt it was time to put my centaur observations into practice (I have so much trouble with centaurs! The proportions always look off to me)

Painted in ArtRage 2.5
1-2 hours

Can you truly survive, perfectly, untouched? What does it take? And what comes out the other side?

This was in response to a prompt from some deviantART club or other to define "survival" - I can't remember if that was in relation to domestic abuse, or if that's just what I took from it. Obviously my figures have vastly improved in recent years - but it was an interesting early experiment with blocks and shapes.

Two or three hours. Artrage 2.5

"...and my heart was like snow under thin crimson skin..."
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

Love - that feeling like your heart is pierced through, by some powerful emotion, when you see some precious image or someone's words and you cannot decide whether to cry or be joyful, and if you are joyful, how do you express it, and is it even true...?

Redness, for love and pain and raw emotion, and literally for the heart. It is fragile and cold and thin like snow, sharp and freezing, melting softly in the heat of feeling... white for snow, purity, emptiness, overwhelmed by the deepness, wounded, bleeding, gaping. Thick black blood, dripping down, carrying the darkness, from deep wounds.

ArtRage 2.5  and graphics tablet. About an hour.

Slightly altered from the earlier version; I had to change it slightly to submit as a print and couldn't decide if it was actually an improvement, so I added it separately (back when I was new to putting my art up!)

The original picture was small and took about half an hour in ArtRage 2.5, with a tablet (my pathetic budget tablet) and this was another half an hour of resizing and reshaping and editing and additional painting. And as may be obvious, was painted to capture that line from Lolita

From a poem my sister wrote...
Just a quick experiment.

This is the first realism portrait I ever painted (and succeeded at!). It's not perfect, but I was happy with it - enough to stop, anyway!

The metal ornaments were pretty tricky; the metallic settings don't blend easily and getting the colours and lighting right was quite hard. Also, a lot of the surfaces were very ...'crumpled'.

Eyes are a much brighter green - the original photo had them a very murky grey, due to the shadows.The hands were actually very hard to get right, as it's all in the very subtle shading, showing the rounding of skin and the position of the joints, so i couldn't just draw the outline as then they looked like blobs. Blobhands.

I couldn't get the expression *exactly* right - I think it's all th ethe line of the mouth; which was also quite ... fiddly.

The Background
...is the one part I'm not happy with. I decided to play safe in the end with a generic portrait/abstract background, rather than a scene.

You can read about the making of the Slave Leia cosplay here

Time: 5 and a half hours
Program: ArtRage 2.5

Random scribbles and coloured linearts (top left) and practice drawings - all in Artrage 2.5

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