Nachtmahr

Lo and behold.... I painted again. This is only my third painting for 2018 so far. My inspiration went down the drain it seems.

This however took me only four days from idea to finish. That is not much, considering I only painted on three days and not that many hours alltogether. The rough, painterly look is made on purpose. I tried very hard to NOT get lost in details at all.

How it came to pass:

At work I have to search the internet often so I sometimes stumble unto interesting stuff or ideas. For some weird reason a version of "Nachtmahr" (Nightmare) by Johann Heinrich Füssli popped up several times lately. Though this style of art is not my favourite, I always loved the Nachtmahr, with the demon sitting on the woman's chest and the scary horse in the background.

So the idea popped into my head to try my hand at this weird, mannered pose and interpret this subject in my style and with Cronachan as the main protagonist. I wanted to achieve a sickly, eerie and somehow scary impression and chose an overall green colour scheme for this. As reference for Cronachan's pose (which was a major pain in the a**), I took one of Füssli's paintings.

On his chest is the evil demon goddess of the helmorui. She looks like a beautiful helmorui female with a segmented scorpiontail, yellow glowing eyes and elongated claws. Check. Got that right, I think. I panted her pale for in this version she is a ghost. And painting her black too... that wouldn't have worked, I think.

It really IS Cronachan's worse nightmare to fall back into the claws of this evil goddess, so weird pose or not... the basic idea of putting him in this painting is even correct.

I really like the outcome and what the last few steps of adding filters and glows did with the overall impression. Hope somebody likes this and kudos to everybody who read my ramblings.

At the moment I am rather proud of myself.