Saturday, March 28, 2009

Soulreaper Making Of

Finished painting is HERE. The letter:
"Dear stranger!
Farewell have I been a great admiror of yours. What you did meant everything to me, yet now you passed away.
It deeply hurts my heart.
Though we never met may you find peace where you are now!"
Soulreaper is the story of a girl that lives in a lifeless forest. She is doomed to kill every (human) being that she touches and so her lonelyness is slowly driving her into madness.

There is a letter that she wrote. You will never clearly know if it refers to a person that she really knew but killed farewell or if it speaks to an unkown person. This is expressed by the two skelettons/ skulls in the background. The spiderwebs show that she has been alone for a very long time, probably sitting there in apathy not able to move because it wouldn't make sense anyways when you are so lonely.

This subject was not easy to approach since I wanted something that has a strong expression rather than some overdetailed superrealistic work without emotion. So I scraped three other versions of this painting until I finally managed to come up with this.

For her pose a reference photo was used that I shot by myself with a friend of mine. It is attached to the making of file. To nail down the typo of the letter a stock photo was used to be able to have something to write on. The stock photo is from scanned_stock. I also referenced the leaves from a stock that was shot by MarlinGrey (both DeviantART).

To remind myself how to keep it simple, I took a look at some of my favorite artists work, among them Enayla, especially "Golden" which strikes by it's simple yet peaceful pose. My favorite comic artist Benjamin also was a great inspiration for the colors!

- Azu

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