Three years later, with my Master’s degree behind me, I have more time to play around with this photo series that accompanies The Counterfet. A big thanks to Dan Abraham of Alchemist Studios for setting up and taking the shot (I’m the one posing as Archimage ).

I enjoy this method, but it’s not something I do often…perhaps we’ll see more later on in the project, but no promises.  We’ve considered changing media between sections based on theme, with some options including pencil, ink (line or wash) and photography.  No firm decisions have been made on if, when, or how yet.

In the original text, the Beast was a big hyena.  I’m not terribly fond of them visually, and would rather not spend a lot of time painting them, so for my own sake I pushed for a more wolf-like interpretation. 

We toyed around with a few different versions: armor clad, mechanical, sculpted of earth and wood, and finally a spirit of soot and smoke.  To express this, I’ve used wet-on-wet and wet-on-damp india ink for the wolf, and watercolor for the prosthetic limb, as shown in the test painting above.  I was hoping to avoid incorporating india ink, despite loving the medium in isolation, but I couldn’t get the right textures with just watercolor.

I love painting deserts, for some reason.  Maybe it’s the (apparent) simplicity, the feeling of expansiveness, or the desolation.  Or maybe it’s just a passing fad.  This particular one was originally going to be a rocky badlands setting, but I’m pretty happy with this incarnation.