Morrigan, Priestess by Wren

Description	:	This was my entry for the second round of the Iron Painter Season 2 competition at Wyrd Games. As Lavron Yor mentioned in his entry, the theme for this round was freehand. I generally shy away from doing much freehand - I like solid colours (I've only just these past few years starting wearing t-shirts with things on the front), I can never think of what design to do, and it adds time onto my already slow painting rate. So I thought this was a great opportunity to take the bull by the horns and really challenge myself. I have done a small amount of picture style freehand, so for this I decided to focus on designs and patterns. After finishing the skin and the design on the dress lining, I started on the pattern on the dress. Laying down those lines was by far the most stressful and annoying part of the paint job. It took 3+ hours over a couple of days to get the gridwork of lines painted to my satisfaction. Filling the colour blocks in was much easier. I had to do highlighting and shading on the individual areas twice, the first time wasn't dramatic enough. Then I cleaned up the brown lines and did a bit of highlighting and shading on those also. The snakes are both based on real world snake patterns. The freehand on them took some patience and a bit of contorting, but not near the kind of tense concentration of the dress stripes. I created scales on the orange and green one by stippling dots, then highlighting the dots facing the light, then glazing the dots with the base colour. On the upper snake, I started with painting the long scales on the underbelly. The pattern on its topside was a loose sort of stippling/dragging motion with the brush that I very much played by ear, but which turned out amazingly like the source picture I was using. For the colour choices, I decided to give the woman the reds, oranges and browns often associated with some kinds of poisonous snakes, and I was aiming for the dress pattern to vaguely evoke a scaly feeling. The snakes were then painted in cooler colours to try to convey the idea that the woman was the most deadly of the three animals. I originally intended to do a colourful mosaic style base, but time really pressed on me and I went with this. I think it was a happy accident, what I originally intended probably would have been visual overload. All paints used were Reaper Master Series.

Poll results:
Number 3 overall.
First Choice: 2 votes
Third Choice: 6 votes

From:	Jack Stresing (gonzominiatures)	(Sat 28 Oct 2006 08:21:47 AM CDT)
I like the highlights on the hair, very effective.

From:	Michael Stubbs` (LavronYor)	(Sun 29 Oct 2006 05:32:17 PM CST)
As I have said elsewhere, beautiful job Wren.