The set is DM's Phantasy Moods, with a hand-painted background you'll be recognising by now! The character -- you know him as Sebastian, one of my faces and body forms, wearing the HZ Victor skinmap and the Rock Star hair by Neftis. The overpainting is all done in GIMP using Ron's brushes -- Birds and Fog.
The images go together to make a kind of story -- something's happening here, and it's not good. He looks like he could be a young acolyte sent out to petition for the life of the tribe! He's out there, staff in hand, and he seems to have it all under control in the first image. Then it all goes pear shaped and he tries to run, but that doesn't work out either. He lands on his knees, scared silly, not sure if he should be trying to run, hide or just pray a lot. Then it's an expression of resignation, and the body language is resigned.
What in the world happened? There's a lot of smoke in these pictures, and if you notice the background -- the birds are out of there, fast! Something nasty happened along. I find myself wondering about the traditional UFO encounter -- or is it just a visitation by something that looks like it just dragged itself out of the Necronomicon? (You know, I actually have a copy of that in paperback, the edition done in the 1970s, with the glue that fell apart on the spine.)
What's he wearing? Well, that's the vest from a buccaneer costume, the G-string from another one and the loin cloth from The Hunter, but I changed out the textures to match, added an opacity map and a displacement map, so they they all turned from leather to the flimsiest of transparent silk. Hey, I was in the mood for exotic fantasy, right?!
Anyway --
On a more sensible note, many apologies for being absent from this blog for a few days. Have been very unwell -- migraine is a major bummer, especially when it hangs around for days, and you can't see properly afterwards.
On a brighter note, I just stumbled over a sale in which I can get a new graphics tablet, and I'm rubbing my hands together in glee! I do have a graphics tablet, but it's a couple of years old and, predictably, it won't work properly under Vista. The hardware itself is okay, but I'd have to run it on my OLD laptop (not the new one, which is Windows 7) so that I could get back to an XP environment. The trouble with that is, the screen is only LCD, which is too dim and "gray" to be good for very delicate artwork. So for the last year or so I've been muddling along without being able to paint properly. Now, at last --! A sale, and I can get hold of a graphics tablet that will shake hands with Vista! It's being shipped today or tomorrow, so I'm hoping it'll get here this week. Can't wait...
UPDATE: There's an adults only continuation to this set of renders, and with all due arm waving and purple flagging about "nudity alerts" and so forth, here's the link. Enjoy!
Jade, 22 February
