Peter Mohrbacher

A Host to Shadows

After spending a couple days poking away at this concept for the angel of shadows, I stopped. This is an illustration I want to make, but it's not an angel portrait the way that the rest of the Angelarium pieces are.

I'm really considering starting to diversify the sorts of illustrations I make for this series, with an eye to depict places and scenarios that relate back to the character portraits I've been making. This might be the starting point for that phase of the project.

We...

Ananiel - Ascendent Pack

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Turiel - Ascendent Pack

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Ananiel, Angel of the Storm

Ananiel - Work in Progress 3

After deeply exploring a different composition and color palette last night, I ended up peeling a good chunk of it back and branching off in a new direction. This is something that has happened several times throughout this series, especially when I'm working under stiff time constraints or in an unfamiliar environment. Last night's dead end came when I did my best to work through a series of difficult and subtle creative choices while on a live video stream. Historically, I've been very bad at ...

Ananiel - Work in Progress 2

The logical color palette for this would be to shades of blue and green. Something that felt like a storm at sea. But it's always more fun to just explore and find something that feels both good and unexpected.

Ananiel - Work in Progress 1

I'm getting cracking on this hot on the heals of Turiel because my art schedule revolves around the end of the calendar month. A peculiar motivator that has ruled this entire campaign since I started it.

Regardless of extreme time constrains, I'm starting the same way I always do. I've wrapped up a couple days of research and sketching with a rough mockup of the composition.

The goal at this point is to have a framework to hang metaphor and emotional honesty upon. For Ananie...

Turiel, Angel of the Mountain

Here I remain,
under a mountain made of many hands,
all reaching and all taking.

I press my body closer to that which I must keep.
It is mine and I will shield it from the misery of other hands.

I can feel their gaze fall on it like an avalanche.

They diminish it with the weight of their indurate eyes.

But it is mine and so I will bury it in the shadow of my protections.

Their greed feeds my convictions,
So here I remain.

Here I remain u...

Turiel, Work in Progress 3

Phew, long painting day. If I were to do this every day, my hand would seize up after a week. There are some real physical limitations to painting that need to be respected and I intend to respect them so I can paint for my whole life.

Turiel - Work in Progress 2

Anyone who has been supporting me for a while has seen that updates come in bursts. That's not because I am waiting for inspiration to hit. As a professional, I need to be able to perform on queue.

The reason these updates come in bursts has to do with the other things I do as a business owner. I typically work 7 days a week, often on non-art related tasks. Whether it is handling business operations or doing layouts and graphics for new products, there is always a to-do list that has art a...

Turiel - Work in Progress 1

The Angel of the Mountain was a concept that I thought really hard about. It produced more abandoned drawings than just about any piece in the series. As I get close to the end of this set of 20, I want to make every one of them deeply unique.

The themes behind this one tie to back to greed and the isolation it creates. It's not enough for this figure to represent a mountain. He has to be destroyed by the mountain. He's strength is his undoing.

Angelarium Wallpapers

While I work on a better solution for accessing the archive of posts, I wanted to dig up all the wallpapers created so far and add them into download. They are attached via a zip file.

Enjoy!

Chazaqiel, Angel of Fog

I awaken and the sensation is much like drowning. My body, buoyant and pulsing in the low light, is tethered to the fallow earth. I reach out as if the sky were made of rungs, but the air resists me in all the ways possible without touch. My wings are damp with sweat and sculpted in repose, but both are lies as I’ve earned neither. Who is it that gives deception as gifts? I hate it here, this place that is somewhere in the middle. Where can I go if I am denied flight? How can I stay if I am de...

Chazaqiel - WiP 3

I'm spending way more time than usual with this piece's values. Normally, you see me jump into a rough color pass before my value study gets this refined, but this piece is so reliant on subtle value shifts, that I'm just keeping in grayscale. So much so, that I'm seriously considering keeping it black and white all the way to the final.

What you aren't seeing, is the number of thin washes that I'm applying to adjust lighting and modeling that simply get pulled back by my 'undo' button. Th...

Chazaqiel - WiP 2

Doing a foggy scene means eliminating local color and value. That's where things start to get weird.

This piece sort of works as a grayscale image, but I am going to keep this version in my back pocket as well. We'll see what wins out as I get more detail in there.

Chazaqiel - WiP 1

Starting on the angel of fog.

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Sariel, Angel of the Waning Moon

----

My body wanes and is distorted.

Smoke moves all around me (troublesome clouds),

and it's as if I cease to exist.

I blink in and out of time and wonder if I can still be seen,

when the light-of-seeing is denied even to me.

Do you still whisper at dusk, or cry out for me at midnight?

Do you still reach to pull yourself up into my light...?

Or do you ebb as I wane?

As if in response to my tired calls,

a wave crashes, 2016-02-03 23:42:36 +0000 UTC View Post

Sariel - WiP 2

Hey guys,

I'm really getting into this one. Sariel might be one of my favorites to work on recently. I'm drawing back on my results from Af, Angel of Anger to get a really surreal color palette. It's something I've always loved doing but I've had a hard time executing on regularly. Being able to get back to that and play in that space is feeling great. I can't wait to see how the final piece turns out.

Most people don't realize this, but Patreon's system makes the end of the month r...

Sariel - WiP 1

I'm finally getting some traction on this piece.Last night, I was going back and forth between color and value. Pushing large areas of light and dark around trying to get the color to splash across it in a way that was interesting and nothing was sticking. Between moments of clarity, there are these horrible troughs of existential dread. Long stretches of time where everything I think I know ceases to be true. It never stops being scary no matter how many times it subsides. So far, it's never fa...

Archangel Gabriel, The Golden Herald

The first of seven archangels.

Gabriel WiP

This is the first piece that I've worked on from outside my home office since I started the project over a year ago. That's part of the reason why it's running behind. It's the little things that pile up. Different OS, tablet, stylus nibs, brush sets, monitors. It sound fiddly but it causes just enough friction to slow things down to the point of stressing the monthly deadline.

I'm getting ahead of it all at this point. My remote work location has been my new home for about a week now ...

Asbeel, Angel of Ruin (Alternate Edition)

This special alternate art for Asbeel was done by the amazing Matt Mrowka. It's the first in a series of alternate art pieces I'm have made for The Book of Watchers.

This post is free and public! So you aren't being billed for it as a Patreon subscriber. 

I'm making a short run of Limited Edition prints for this piece. There will only be 50 copies as opposed to the regular 100. You can see it on the store here :  2016-01-13 00:04:26 +0000 UTC View Post

Big Changes to Collectible Cards / Tutorials

Hey guys,

Sending out random packs of collectible cards is something that was a really cool experiment for us and it's coming to a close. This is the last month we'll be shipping out cards as part of this campaign.

The process of ordering, packing and mailing them weighed really heavily on the campaign as a whole and it was voted as the least popular part of the whole experience by the people who responded to the survey last month.

In their place I'll be selling ...

Penemue - Ascendant Pack

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