There’s got to be a better way of evolving – or at least one that doesn’t involve so much owie!

Hmmm, I wonder if this qualifies for entry to the Dark series …

miika's new avatar - June 2010

Rendered in Poser, postwork in Photoshop.

Writing the words to the story proved to be much harder than rendering this portion of the story, so I’ve posted the image for now while I refine the writing, which I’ll add once it’s done.

Warning: This image is absolutely NOT safe for work.  You’ve been warned.

Embracing Darkness

Rendered in Poser, postwork done in Photoshop.

I’m not so sure she appreciates her “helper” though.

Inspired by 5 cats all deciding to hide under my desk during the recent thunderstorms.

They were about as helpful too

You are NOT helping!

Rendered in Poser then heavily postworked in Photoshop.

Vampires are one of those concepts that sit on the edge between darkness and light so perfectly – they’re dangerous, killers, but their eroticism and attraction is undeniable.  As such, they’re fun to depict in artwork in the same way that I take Giger-esque aliens and put them in ambiguous scenes.

Like the “Promise” series images, I’ll write a short accompanying story fragment to go with the pic and put it up on my main web site.

Take a look and decide for yourself – is the victim willing, resigned, or … ?

This might sting a little ...

Created in Poser, postwork using Photoshop and Picasa.

I’m just amazed no-one’s ever thought of this way to deal with werewolves (or other lycanthropes for that matter).

Of course, there’s a few technical details to work out with the technique – such as how to get within range to scritch to begin with.  I’m thinking a good chunk of steak, myself.

To soothe the savage beast

So instead of starting yet another doodle, it was off to Picasa to see what other doodles I’ve started but never quite clicked in the past, and this one sprang out at me.  It was originally for the Red Witch series, but it never really looked quite right – her established armor/clothing and tattoos never fit the concept I had in mind for the image.

I recently added new skin textures to my collection though, and one in particular seemed to go perfectly with it.  The combination of such thick tattoos plus sparkling body jewels brought the image more into life.

I changed the original’s contents of the goblet from liquid to a sparkling powder-like substance, generating the initial flow in-camera.  As much as I tried to change the camera angles, I wasn’t able to completely cover all the genitalia, and so had to break the idea a little by adding a thong, but the upper body coverage worked perfectly.  A different hairstyle rounded off the image.

This took a lot more passes than I usually make for a render to take into Photoshop for postwork.  In addition to the color, ambient occlusion, shadow, and displacement passes of the past, I needed to break the image down into several alpha mats.  These were needed for the additional effects I knew would be needed to add kick to the result.

The hair was made less “artificial looking”, and the sparkles in the air separate from the golden ones falling from the goblet were added using brushes.  Some tidying up was needed for the overlaps between various layers as well.

The title and signature feather were added inside Photoshop as well, then the whole thing was saved and taken into Picasa for the watermark.  All told, this image took the whole day to produce, but the results seem worth it!

That Hit The Spot

I still wanted to keep to my favourite themes, primarily tattoos and redheads.  Normally I render images of me with braided or dreadlocked hair, but I wanted to continue the theme I explored with “A New Look“.

The extreme short redhaired bob has its own stark yet sharp appearance, as the Red Witch series proved, and it’s kind of interesting to change my “look” so radically.

Avatar alpha

I liked this first version, but after uploading it into Twitter, I decided that it was too dark to be able to display properly in the Twitter thumbnails.  So I went back to it and zoomed in on the head alone.  The end result looks much nicer at the small resolution Twitter (and others such as Microsoft Live! and Yahoo) use.

Avatar bravo

Rendered in Poser, postwork done in Photoshop.