April MOTM: from deep in the caverns below - painting process video // nsfw

download the attached .mov file below to access the process video for april's MOTM painting!

whenever i do a monster of the month painting, i always want to make sure i show off enough of the monster's design. i pour my heart into coming up with what they look like, so i don't want to obscure them too much or hide the features that are the most reflective of their theme or aesthetic. i often choose the poses, angles, and compositions based on what parts of their appearance i find most interesting. if they have a cool design feature along their spine i might want to draw them from the side or from the back, where you can get a good view of it, rather than depicting them from the front. if i'm extra proud of their face, i'll probably want to make it a focal point, instead of choosing a pose that partly obscures their head. and so on.

this month, it honestly took me a few tries to come up with a pose and composition that would showcase enough of the monster. in the first couple of drafts the viewer saw them from the front, with the human on his back and the cavern crawler between his legs. it's a lovely pose, sure, but the perspective and the rock that the diver was laying on obscured much of the most interesting part of his monstrous lover: that is, his long tail and the many little leggies along the side of it. 

i changed the angle so you could behold his whole tail in all its glory... but now found that if i kept them positioned in the same way, you wouldn't see much of the monster's front and head. i've been wanting to draw more oral anyway, so i decided to draw some dicksucking (or i guess dick-licking) rather than penetration. that way you could see all of the cavern crawler, nose to tailtip, while also getting a nice view of the action. 

in the case of this painting i also wanted to give special attention to the background. as already discussed in the design commentary, i wanted to situate them in a chamber of the partially flooded caverns this monster lives in. that meant leaving enough space around the characters for the backdrop, and the end result is that this piece is a bit more 'zoomed out' than many of my other paintings. i admittedly worry a little bit that the composition is *too* zoomed out and that i didn't focus enough on the sexy bits. i considered making the framing a bit tighter, but that would entail cropping parts of the cavern crawler's body and the background, both of which i wanted to show off, so ultimately i opted not to. i suppose that with this piece the smuttiness level is less 'in your face.' it's almost like the viewer is another cave explorer who happens to catch a glimpse of this couple from afar.

making the composition look balanced was a challenge in general. as you can see i tried to position the monster's tail in various ways, and experimented with different constellations of stalagmites and stalactites that would even it out. in any case such stone formations are perfect for creating layers of foreground, middle ground, and background, so i jumped on that opportunity. since the backdrop was so important to this piece i started painting it before i began colouring the characters themselves. i don't know what it is with me and green lately (perhaps it's the changing seasons and my excitement for the impending arrival of summer in all its lush glory) but this is the third month in a row my MOTM painting has had a more or less green colour palette. i'm certainly not complaining, and i felt like hues of green would go well with the monster's milky white colour. 

cards on the table i also wanted to choose hues that were as different from my character nehaneru as possible, because he's also a white monster with exoskeletal plates and many insectoid leggies. i'm not saying they look "too similar" or that i'm "not allowed" to draw monsters that happen to have some design features in common. it's perfectly fine to create two (or more) characters that resemble one another, whether it's because it makes sense for each separate design or because you simply love that look a lot. god knows i have a billion beefy were-creatures with dark colours and fluffy manes, for example. but if two designs have a similar vibe i still enjoy trying to push them in subtly different directions, because diversity is nice and makes each design more individual and personalised. so where nehaneru is a kind of pearlescent white, with undertones that shift in all the colours of the rainbow, i chose eerie and 'sickly' yellows for this cavern crawler; and where i might choose a purple or blue or pinkish background palette for nehaneru, i choose spooky greens for this painting.

the stylistic relationship between the characters and the background is similar to that in my hunter & the beast piece; the characters are drawn sharper and more defined, while the cavern setting is rendered in a soft and textured style. there's some definition where the characters 'touch' the background, so they look connected to it rather than just hovering in front of it. but the discrepancy in rendering style still serves to draw focus to the characters, at the same time as they're clearly situated in a setting that helps tell their story. in the same vein i added more detail and definition to the parts of the monster that are visible above the surface of the pool, while leaving the submerged bits of his tail partly obscured by the green water.

speaking of the water, there's some 'bursts' in the process video where a lot of stuff seems to happen all at once. that's because i was adding big gradients on layers with funky settings (like 'overlay' or 'multiply'), or messing around with the colour balance, contrasts, and vibrance. as i've mentioned in many other process posts, i often use such tricks to give my colours a boost, make a painting look more vivid, or create neat effects. i wasn't entirely sure how i wanted to render the water at first, so i figured it out as i went, and a big part of it was to experiment with different layer settings.

one thing i have to confess is that this scene probably "shouldn't" be this bright. after all, i spent parts of the design commentary talking about how this monster lacks eyes because he lives in a lightless environment where sight doesn't serve him. but i don't like drawing pictures that are so dark you can barely see what's going on, so i "cheated" and painted the cave quite well lit. now that i think about it, perhaps the monster originates from pitch black caves, but met his human bae in a cavern where the waters glow with a strange green light...?

speaking of the human, i tried to add some subtle storytelling by dressing him in a sleek diving suit, indicating that he's had to swim through flooded tunnels to meet up with his monster. i already said we don't have to worry about the way the crawler has clawed at it, though, because i love it when aquatic or amphibious monsters magically gift their humans with the ability to breathe underwater and move through it with supernatural ease. i just like the idea of ripped clothes as evidence of sexy impatience, and the aesthetic of flipper-clad feet somehow fit right into this image, too. now i'm just wondering about whether the pale cavern crawler is the only one of his kind or if there's others where he once came from, and if his lover will choose to return to human society or follow him into the deep.

painting this piece was challenging but even if i've focused on some of the struggles and second-guessing i don't want to give the impression i didn't enjoy the process or that i'm displeased with the result. it was challenging in a good way and a great learning experience. i'm giving myself some constructive criticism and making notes for the future, while still being incredibly happy with how the painting came out. this process text ended up being less about the steps the piece went through or the methods and techniques i used, and more about my thought process as i was making various decisions along the way. i just had more to say about that side of things this month. but if you want to know more about my painting process per se i have outlined my current approach in several recent process posts, which you can find under the #process tag <3 plus, if you have any questions, you can always comment below!

// art + characters © me.