Peter Mohrbacher

Israfel, Shadow of Perfect Bliss - (Detail Phase)

Time to bring it all home.

The goal right now is to avoid killing the soft focus of this piece while also cleanly defining all the edges, surface details and minor details.

There are still areas where I'm making a few corrections, but I want to nail down the supporting bits first. Working back to front has always helped me stay focused when I get to this step. That means starting with the background details first and working forwards in the piece, completing the character details ...

Israfel, Shadow of Perfect Bliss - (Color Phase)

Bang! Colors!

I'm using Albert Beirstadt as the muse for this one. He's had a dozen or so paintings in my reference folder for ages, so I'm long overdue to create a painting with that iconic pastoral look to it.

Doing creative stuff is a joy. Not being musical myself I can only imagine the pleasure musicians have messing around with their instruments. If it's anything like the way I feel about making paintings, I bet it's pretty good. That super positive mood is what I want to ach...

Israfel, Shadow of Perfect Bliss - (Value Phase)

Throwing a little sepia on top of the piece at this point always seems to make it a little extra.

When things are going smoothly, the difference between steps in my paintings feel like nothing much is changing. It's still the same drawing, it's still the same background. What's the big deal?

Where the value work pays off most for me is in the next step when I apply color (each phase of the painting for me should ideally be doing this). The sculpting and definition that gets provid...

Israfel, Shadow of Perfect Bliss - (concept phase)

" In Heaven a spirit doth dwell
   “Whose heart-strings are a lute”;   
None sing so wildly well
As the angel Israfel,
And the giddy stars (so legends tell),   
Ceasing their hymns, attend the spell   
   Of his voice, all mute."

(continued)
                        &nbs...

February Rewards + Discount Code

All wallpapers, works in progress, high res finals and PSDs for Matariel, Font of Life are now on their respective Discord channels. Log  into the Angelarium Discord channel to download them and access the  complete archive.

This month's Patreon exclusive 10% off promo code is GIFT10. It's good for anything on www.angelarium.net/store including prints, cards, playmats and ...

Matariel, Font of Life

 O lonely fountain, bless us mortals that dwell beneath you

Let our gratefulness abate your sadness

Let our prayers reach you, lonely Matariel

All men and beasts seek your embrace

We beg that you may stretch your hand out to us

So we may continue to praise your generosity

O great muse of rain, O sustainer of life

We patiently await your blessing

Matariel, Font of Life - (detail phase)

Rocks, leaves and little water droplets. I'm scrubbing though the whole painting inch by inch and defining each tiny bit as precisely as I can. This has been such a joy that I want to keep refining smaller and smaller details, but I don't want to overwork it. My plan for finding a balance will be to take a look that the renaissance paintings that I'm using as reference and see how precise those paintings are up close.

One of the things I really wanted to show in this scene is how equall...

Matariel, Font of Life - (color phase)

I love working with earth tones. Part of me didn't want to jump into the colors on this too fast because I knew I wanted to get them just perfect. The longer I wait to add colorization to a scene, the more the underlying values contribute to their subtlety. The mixture of soft oranges in the transition from light to shadow is a sign that it's working properly. Having complimentary colors emerge in the cracks between values is exactly what I want to see when I start layering gradient maps and ...

Matariel, Font of Life - (value phase)

Just a few more brush strokes and this piece has begun to emerge even further. Having a clear sense of the lighting and mood from my reference material has made this go shockingly fast. There's still a question of how rainy I want this piece to ultimately be, but that feels like the sort of thing I can work out close to the end.

Lighting can be a tricky thing but the light on a rainy day is actually more simple than average. The soft shadows created where corners meet is called "ambient...

Matariel, Font of Life - (concept phase)

This is a painting I've been thinking about on and off for years now. Matariel, Angel of Rain is one of my favorite designs from the series, so I've been looking for a good opportunity to paint it again. The end of the Watchers series has given me the perfect opportunity to take a swing at it.

What's interesting to me about this sketch is how complete it already is. Sometimes I end up making significant changes to poses or proportions after I scan in a drawing. This time, all I ended up...

A few rare prints came back!

If you are interested in owning some of the older Angelarium pieces, there are a few that recently came back from a gallery that went out of business. I had several prints hanging at Ikon Gallery in Canton, OH before they closed. The owner was nice enough to send those prints back to me and they are now for sale on the store.

These older pieces were only printed in a run of 25, so they are super rare. I've marked the price accordingly. Before I tell anyone else, I wanted to make sure yo...

January Rewards + Discount Code

All wallpapers, works in progress, high res finals and PSDs for Sariel, The Lone Seeker are now on their respective Discord channels. Log  into the Angelarium Discord channel to download them and access the  complete archive.

This month's Patreon exclusive 10% off promo code is COSMOS10. It's good for anything on www.angelarium.net/store including prints, cards, playmats a...

Auction for Lament of Sathariel - Original Oil Painting

One of the big promises I've been making to myself is to finally get the photography equipment I need in order to properly record my traditional paintings. That way I would be able to honestly show them off for sale or auction.

I just started a 10 day auction for my largest oil painting to date. All the info about it is on the Ebay page: https://www.ebay.com/itm/254103692533

Sariel, The Lone Seeker

As the Earth tugs on the Moon, the Moon tugs back on the Earth. For each force, another will always exist in perfect opposition. The lives of men and Angels are similar. Though the power of one may be greater than the other, their existence reflects each other.

When the war started, the Angels that were uninvolved stayed clear of the wave of death that spread across the Earth. To risk one’s immortality on fighting seemed chance not worth taking. Sariel perched above it all, waiting fo...

Sariel, The Lone Seeker - Details

As I explored this piece, I thought a lot about what I wanted to see in it. In the fiction, I think of Sariel as being someone who is constantly looking to the sky. I wanted to parallel that to my own fascination with the planets and stars. One of my great hopes for the future is that my kids get to personally visit the moon. I thought about that a lot as I painted. I know I’m not the only person out there that would sacrifice a lot in order to take steps to venture out into the cosmos.

Sariel, The Lone Seeker - Color Phase

My big goal for this piece was to show a scene that was lit by moonlight. In those circumstances, the colors get pressed together in an interesting way. In low light, only certain receptors in our eyes end up absorbing enough light to be perceptible. Our perception that low light is bluish comes from that fact. The warmth from skin fades away and certain strong colors can flatten out nearly to grey. In their absence, our minds fill in the gaps. The imagination can begin to overlay a rainbow o...

Sariel, The Lone Seeker - Sketch Phase

I’ve been slowing down a lot while I’m drawing. Some of my friends produce such unbelievably lovely drawings and that inspires me to invest more in my own pencil work. The extra time I’m taking to be more mindful of my marks isn’t just a practical choice, it really makes me enjoy drawing more. The intensely slow pace of it feels like a feature and not a bug. The time spent on the couch with my sketchbook and cat is time well spent, regardless of the outcome.

My lifelong goal is ...

Rare Canvas Prints and Playmats

Hey Patrons,

Starting off the new year, I'm tidying up the studio and that means clearing out all the cool stuff that I've got laying around that doesn't normally live in the store.

https://www.angelarium.net/store/?category=Last+Copies

Rolled Canvas Prints

The plan was to offer canvas prints at conventions that were finely printed but not stretched or mounted in order to m...

Rare Stuff

Hey guys,

I'm trying to do less promo these days and just focus on content, but there are a few of rare items I've got hanging around the studio and I don't know who else to tell about it.

There are a couple LE Raziel mats and a LE Chazaqiel mat that shook loose from a cleaning expedition a few months back. They are listed on the store right now.

www.angelarium.net/store

I've got a bunch of rolled canvas prints that are all prepped to get listed as well. I'll make anot...

December Rewards + Discount Code

All wallpapers, works in progress, high res finals and PSDs for Samyaza, King of Kings are now on their respective Discord channels. Log  into the Angelarium Discord channel to download them and access the  complete archive.

This month's Patreon exclusive 10% off promo code is CROWN10. It's good for anything on www.angelarium.net/store including prints, cards, playmats and...

Samyaza, King of Kings

When the Watchers were a chorus, they had no names. They were formless and as one. Each Angel whispered together amidst the song of the cosmos. They sang of nothing and everything. No will or thought, only light. A boundless existence.

As they sang, a single mote of something, of nothing, passed through the Angel’s light and cast a speck of a shadow down upon the earth. Beneath the stars, that shadow looked back at the heavens and saw himself for the first time. In that moment he took a...

Soul of Mortality - Pin Prototype

Free gift for $75 patrons this month.

----

I've been quietly plugging away at making a new pin design for the past year or so. Today, I got prototypes in the mail!

This is an early run and will be slightly different than the final ones that I end up releasing next year. There are a few tweaks to edges, materials and colors I want to make now that I've gotten to see how it came out in person.

I needed to make at least 100 of them in ord...

Samyaza, King of Kings - Work in Progress 3

So much of what’s needed at this point is just tightening down the pattern work. Doing detailed patterns is something that I’ve never felt I was any good at, but it’s got a meditative quality that I’m drawn to. Maybe someday the repetition of this repetition will build into a genuine skill. In the meantime, I’m drawing and redrawing stripes on separate layers in case I need to go back and start over.

The power of Photoshop for this work isn’t just in keeping elements separate. A lo...

Samyaza, King of Kings - Work in Progress 2

I’m trying to do something different with this one. Getting a little ahead on my art making schedule has inspired me to be a little more experimental. Some people weren’t so hot on my experiments with the last painting (Kokabiel), but each of these pieces aren’t meant to be for everyone. At the same time I was getting comments about not liking that painting, my wife was asking if we could get a special print for the house. That level of divisiveness is always encouraging to me.

For this ...

Samyaza, King of Kings - Work in Progress 1

The power to command is something we all recognize in the world. A force so natural, it’s almost invisible. Personally, I’ve always resisted observing authority. It’s lead to a life where I’ve easily slid into the roll myself. In most situations, people are so unwilling to assign themselves authority, that anyone who does, gets the job.

On a couple of occasions a line has formed at conventions that blocks my table. I’ll just get up and start waving my arms like an air traffic control...

November Rewards + Discount Code

All wallpapers, works in progress, high res finals and PSDs for Kokabiel, The Burning Light are now on their respective Discord channels. Log  into the Angelarium Discord channel to download them and access the  complete archive.

This month's Patreon exclusive 10% off promo code is LISTEN10. It's good for anything on www.angelarium.net/store including prints, cards, playmats and ...

Kokabiel, The Burning Light

 The fair and childlike Kokabiel saw things in the stars that his brother Watcher’s did not. To him, he saw unknowable mysteries unfolding in the night sky. Men came to him, with hopes of divining some earthly meaning behind the movement of the heavenly bodies. Though he spoke with them often, it was difficult to take real information from his readings. The places and things that he described were in vivid detail, but failed to resemble to world in which they lived. At first, the obtuse q...

Inspirational Monday - Evangelion

Probably the #1 question I get about my work is "Have you seen Evangelion?". Short answer; yes. 

Long answer:

Around 1998, I found a small independent video store near my house that would rent tapes for $1 each. As far as I can tell, they might have had the most killer anime collection of any video rental store in the US. Part of the collection was the original release of Evangelion's original TV series, spanned across 12 VHS tapes. I watched those, A LOT.

Evangelion is the ...

Kokabiel, The Burning Light - Detail Phase

Piece by piece. Moment by moment. Things just click.

A lot of painting is asking the picture what it wants and doing your best to make it happy. Looking back over the earlier versions of this piece makes me nervous. I wonder if I had a plan or if I was just hoping some magic would happen later on. I used to have a harder time trusting the process, but these days I've got a lot of faith in it.

This thing isn't quite done, but it feels capable of being done. A few more minor color tw...

Kokabiel, The Burning Light - Color Phase

Adding color isn't just about figuring out which colors to use or what color things are, it's also about figuring out what doesn't have a color. I realized pretty early on in this process that I wanted to have the stars be colorful but leave everything else fairly dull. The purpose to to show that the sensation Kokabiel is having is dulling the world around him and taking him out of his body.

Subtly is hard but at this point I think I know where it's all headed.