Archive for the ‘Girls’ Category

They should you know, and don’t give them something stupid like lily pads either. Get them roses, I mean honestly.

I was taking a break at the local coffee house when I drew this gal, an apsaras. Apsaras are from Hindu myth, they are said to inspire the arts and tempt aesthetics away from their meditations by having sex with them. Nice!

The most famous aesthetic to be tempted by the apsaras was Siddhartha. However, he maintained his meditations, acheived Enlightenment, and become the Supreme Buddha.

It’s interesting to note that this myth touches on an inherent struggle between aesthetic religions and the cultural arts, a struggle which can be seen whenever somebody want to ban/burn books or music albums. The fact that most books and albums are singled out because of their sexual content proves the symbolic insight of the apsaras myth.

My goal was to simply draw a curvy, hindu sex spirit. I know that face veils are middle-eastern, not Hindu, but I have a thing for belly dancers. It wasn’t hard to find inspiration or reference, ancient depictions of the Apsaras are not subtle (in fact more modern depictions are possitively puritan by contrast and that is not an exaggeration) they are almost entirely hips and breasts (which means they are the mythological gals for me!). I imagine that back in the day, the apsaras were probably the masturbation subject of choice for young men.

After much reworking and advice from many other artists over at ConceptArt.org, I’ve reworked the Selina picture. It’s now far more dramatic and gets across the idea that her bones are glowing through her transleucent flesh. I want to particularly thank Dan DonSantos for his help and his blessing on this picture. It was inspired by a picture of his own and I was so worried that I gave him a call to make sure it was okay. He let me know  that it was fine, that all artists copy one another on some level, and that this picture was a far cry from plagerism. He then proceeded to give me advice on how to improve the piece.

Considering that we’d never met or even talked to each other before (about the only thing we had in common was that we both have done work for White Wolf) I was blown away. You should check out his work, it’s top notch and I hope that my own work can eventually be of the quality his is.

I started using a lot of different sytles of photoshop brush with this picture. As a result the background came easily and quickly, but the improved quality of the background demanded that I put more effort into the figure. It’s a classic dark fantasy/ horror girl picture so I gave it a classic composition.

Yes, that’s Sutro tower in the background for all my SF peeps!