Sketches, draws, illustrations, paintings and stuf

Inanna / Ishtar study.

I wanted to share a little more of the process behind the cover I’m currently painting for my novel.

The character is Arisnari, a Hurrian priestess, and I’m painting the entire piece in Krita.

I’m somewhere around 60 hours of work at this point, and the painting has turned into a much bigger learning exercise than I originally expected.

One of the things I’ve been experimenting with is using gray tones throughout the image to stabilize the colors and create a slightly ethereal atmosphere. Instead of treating gray simply as desaturation, I’ve been using it almost as another color that helps unify the skin, hair, fabric and surrounding light.

I’ve also started becoming much more comfortable with deliberately losing detail.

The mouth is a good example.

Arisnari is singing in the scene, so I slightly blurred and displaced parts of the mouth rather than rendering every edge sharply. The idea is to make the viewer perceive movement and sound instead of reading the expression simply as an open mouth.

At the moment I’ve finished most of the face and I’m moving into the body and clothing.

The full composition will eventually include a group of Ezekiel-style angels in the background. I mean the strange ones: rings, eyes and geometric forms rather than human figures with wings.

The pencil-looking marks currently surrounding parts of the face are temporary construction lines. Right now they make her look suspiciously like the vocalist of a black metal band.