#corpse paint

closer than you know

i've been working on this painting for over 3 months and i am exhausted 💀 so excited to be done with it. i'm really proud of it though!! it's definitely the most detailed painting i've done in quite some time.

You can see them make out sloppy style in corpse paint here

Close-ups below!

pov youre standing in line for emperor merch and this guy stands behind you and drips on you and gets your brand new shirt wet

*taps on the microphone, which makes a terrible whistle*

So… It all started with this:

I was sketching Terzo, and when I removed the sketch layer, I noticed how his paint alone was enough to form the recognizable shape of his face. Just a few strokes of black, and he’s there.

I’ve always found Terzo’s corpse paint iconic in its simplicity and geometry, free of all unnecessary elements. As was well said in the gonstfm podcast, it’s so simple that it’s easy to recognize even from a long distance, without the little details “polluting” it. His corpse paint is easy to remember, recognize, replicate, and spot among others.

As a former Fine Arts student, I can’t help but draw connections to art movements (that were never confined to art alone). The first that comes to mind is Cubism: simplifying forms, reducing them to geometric shapes. In the From the Pinnacle to the Pit music video, the Cubist influence is very evident also in the architecture. Similar structures can also be found in other iconic 1920s films, like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and Metropolis, both main influences for the Meliora era.

This makes perfect sense, since Meliora is set in the early 20th century; the concept of representing multiple perspectives at the same time, and the deconstruction of forms, fits Terzo’s era perfectly in my opinion.

Terzo is often associated with Futurism, but that wasn’t the only artistic movement of the 20th century, and it was certainly not the only one that inspired him.

This is where I bring in Piet Mondrian, father of Neoplasticism: the extreme synthesis of form. I believe he plays a big role in this pot of references.

Mondrian’s art progressively becomes an increasingly reduced and essential representation, as we can see from the evolution of his tree and on Terzo’s corpse paint, where the skull is not a “skull” anymore, but a vague, geometric representation of it:

In Neoplasticism, there are, in fact, well-defined boundaries. But these boundaries are not truly closed; straight lines in rectangular opposition to each other constantly intersect so that their rhythm continues throughout the work… These borders will be clearly defined but not “closed”; there will be no customs, no work permits. “Foreigners” will not be considered aliens.

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I find it fascinating that Mondrian’s simplifications expanded beyond art and into the “real” world and society, becoming an expression of freedom of the people.

But Terzo’s corpse paint wasn’t the only thing influenced by major 1920s artistic movements: his whole face resembled one of those Art Deco statues crowning skyscrapers, especially in the USA branch.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Terzo’s era takes place in a historical period when art was abandoning academic perfection and cold realism, moving toward something more conceptual. Instead of objectively representing reality, it aimed to express something deeper, something the eyes alone could not grasp. It was a crucial time of change and a break with tradition, when all unnecessary ornamentation was stripped away, and the focus was on the message, the substance, where shape only needed to give a vague suggestion of what it represented.