Out of this darkness, I'll come for you.

This piece came from a few places inside my head, but mostly it's just experimental. I hadn't done a really dark piece in quite some time so I wanted to get back to that for a moment, but I also wanted to add a twist by throwing in an element not typically seen in portraiture, so I selected an old hand-drawn catacomb blueprint to go with this piece. The blueprint isn't transposed via Photoshop. It's actually drawn.

I guess the main feeling I get from this is somewhat Egyptian, as if the model (who, in this, is my dear Belgian jealous boyfriend ~Deemer) is a pharoah risen from his own tomb. But at the same time I get a very modern, almost futuristic feeling from it as well, as though that pharoah who had fallen thousands of years ago has awoken in an age where maps can just be plucked from the air and projected onto nothing... like all those futuristic movies where you can interact with holograms. So, ancient meets modern, perhaps? Interpret it as you will.

This piece actually gave me a some trouble. I haven't done as much erasing on a piece as I did on this one in a long long time, and if you know anything about charcoal... it doesn't erase. At first I had kind of a rinky-dink background to this but it made the figure pop too much. I wanted him to be coming out of darkness, in a way, like a phantom of himself... so I blackened the entire background instead. I also had a bit more of the map stuff on the left but thought it completely threw off the balance of the piece. I like how the darkness flows from the upper left to the lower right. (Holy crap, and I talking about technical stuff here? I think I've been on dA too long. )

Anyway, hope you somewhat enjoy it.

Oh, and I forgot to mention... those swirly things on his left, beside his eye and on his neck... those are kinda tattoo type things that I just added in there for some atmosphere. They seem to blend in a little too much on the computerized version but... I guess that's one of the downfalls of submitting traditional artwork on a webside, eh? Of course it is! I'll stop talking now.

Charcoal on 90 lb. paper
18" x 20"
Please full-view. The small version is crap.

Original Sold: South Australia