Peter Mohrbacher

Zachriel, The High Priestess - WiP 1

I'm dipping back into the AI well for this piece.

I meant to just pop into my reference folder for this card and see if there were any AI generations that I wanted to use for this painting and I ended up getting lost down a rabbit hole.

This is my first step into this piece. It's a MidJourney bake with a bit of overpainting to help establish Zachriel's design.

Purah, Angel of Amnesia

One should fear accumulating forever without release. The burden of carrying all moments of one's life is too great. It is better to lighten the load, lest we become paralyzed by the weight of memory. Or worse yet, crushed beneath a thousand tiny burdens.

Purah, Angel of Amnesia - WiP 3

Brightening things up and tightening them down!

Oracle of Watchers - Progress Update

Hey guys!

With Purah wrapping up, I'm finally at the stage where I can lay out the final art on the Oracle of Watchers cards as well as the remake of the Oracle of Emanations deck.

The plan is to presell these cards via Kickstarter as soon as I can get cost estimates and product samples back from my card printer. It's been a while since I created a new product and I'm getting pretty excited!

Attached is a preview of the two decks in their current state along with some larger...

Purah, Angel of Amnesia - WiP 2

A classic color palette feels right for this piece. Hoping to make the colors easy on myself since I'm challenging myself in other ways on this one.

The head dissolving into blocks looked really good on the sketch but I don't think it will make it to the final...

Purah, Angel of Amnesia - WiP 1

Sorry for the long absence, I have been having a challenging couple of months and I don't know where my time and attention are going right now. When I'm in a tough place, I tend to avoid posting works in progress because I'm worried the work is not worth sharing, so I wait until I'm feeling more confident in it before I begin to post the progress shots.

This year I have experimented quite a bit with my work methods. Almost to the point where I feel like I've been progressively forgettin...

UK Book Distributor?

Hi folks,

Would any of you happen to know of a book distributor in the UK that might be interested in the Angelarium books?

I'm just about ready to give up on my UK shipping hub and I would rather sell my inventory off to a UK book seller rather than simply shut out all of the UK fans from buying from me.

Let me know if you have any ideas.

Much love,

-Pete

Hurricane Delay

Hi folks,

I've been working on the last couple of pieces for the Oracle deck this last month and the plan was to post them before the end of September, but I got hit by a couple of things that I didn't expect.

Firstly, I've been working on a secret commission that I can't talk about. It was supposed to get cleared out quickly but I was on track to finish it with enough time to also wrap up on my September paintings.

Unfortunately, during the time I was working on this commis...

Butator, Angel of Calculation

Butator, Angel of Calculation - WiP 3

There's a lot of little tweaks in this that I ended up committing to as I began work on trying to wrap this piece up. Some of the changes were due to my pickiness about composition and detail while others were more thematic.

It's always a bit uncomfortable creatively committing to a particular direction. The only way I deal with it is to leave the door open to a round of edits down the line. Sometimes I will pop back in on a piece months later and try out some idea that was bugging me, ...

Butator, Angel of Calculation - WiP 2

The big changes here are me messing with Butator's staff. One of the things that always ends up being true, is that when I add elements that loom over the Angel's head, the scale of things starts to get a little weird. I like to have the figure's head stand as the top point in the triangle of my compositions.

Lighting wise, I'm pulling out my oldest and dustiest tricks. So I hope you don't mind. I love these low hanging spotlights.

Butator, Angel of Calculation - WiP 1

After a few failed attempts, I managed to get a sketch I'm really happy with. I wanted this piece to have a more dynamic view than the other recent Watchers pieces. I love a good wide angle portrait :)

I'm imagining Butator as this very insect-like figure. Someone venerable, but more inhuman than a lot of the other Watchers. 

July Reward + Discount Code

What an interesting month! I'm finally delivering the extra quantities of art that I'm always promising :) The progress shots, high res images, and layered files for The Death Tarot, Apollyon, and Sachiel are all on the Dropbox folder.

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/qj1bbq1putlz0os/AABCiWE8xlx-5HT_mRcZEBbpa?dl=0 

Summer Sale

As one of my beloved patrons, you a...

Apollyon, Angel of the Void

The tao that can be described
is not the eternal Tao.
The name that can be spoken
is not the eternal Name.

The nameless is the boundary of Heaven and Earth.
The named is the mother of creation.

Freed from desire, you can see the hidden mystery.
By having desire, you can only see what is visibly real.

Yet mystery and reality
emerge from the same source.
The source is called darkness.

Darkness born from darkness.
The beginning of all understanding...

Looking to hire a web dev with Shopify experience

Hi everyone.

I need someone with web development experience to talk to about my site. I'd like to hire someone to help me upgrade the Angelarium Shopify site, but I haven't had a good experience with sites like Fivrr.

Please feel free to email me if this is something you have experience with or know someone who has experience with it.

creator@angelarium.net

Much love,

-Pete

Sachiel, Angel of Coin

From atop the hill, a river flowed down to the little people. The Watcher's wordless mouth came the click and clack of metal. It's abode smelled of copper and ripe flesh. A dangerous thing was he. The one with the blood of gold.

Angelarium Summer Sale

Hey guys, 

Everything in the shop has an extra 20% discount right now. If you could help me get the word out, I would greatly appreciate it <3

angelarium.shop 

Thanks,

-Pete

Death Tarot

Unlikely that this card actually represents a physical death. Typically it implies an end, possibly of a relationship or interest, and therefore implies an increased sense of self-awareness. The card typically depicts the Grim Reaper, and when used for divination is often interpreted as signifying major changes in a person's life.

//Azrael, Death Tarot - WiP 3

Just now I'm realizing Az has a real Dr. Manhattan vibe in this piece.

Anyways. I feel like Azrael's hood gets floppier every time I draw it. Someday that thing is going to be hanging down to their elbows. All seven of them.

I think my brain is melting...

Apollyon, Angel of the Void - WiP 2

I'm working on a lot of stuff recently huh? The plan is to get back to weekly posting once I'm all caught up. Almost there!

This piece is part of the growing collection of work experiments where I'm trying to determine how I prefer to work with AI. In this case, both determining the structure of the piece as well as cleaning it up has been a bit of a bear. While I really enjoy the colorful swirls in theory, in practice cleaning them up to mesh with my painting style has been a deeply ma...

Sachiel, Angel of Coin - WiP 2

In my mind, I've always seen this guy as being dark and colorless but I didn't want to leave this painting all black and gold. The more I poked around it, the more this blue sky fought to emerge from behind him.

Unlike the AI stuff I've been working on recently, I'm just stacking brush strokes on brush strokes for this piece. What's weird to me is that going back to this work method feels like climbing without a harness now. Everything in the frame is up to me and whatever ghost haunts ...

Azrael, Death Tarot - WiP 2

After a few failed experiments, I settled on this composition with a dark/light split down the middle. I felt that having elements of the composition passing back and forth between the two halves was how I wanted to communicate the themes of this card.

Color wise, I wanted to use more separate this depiction of Azrael from the past ones. I want this deck to be colorful when it's all done and I want the Death card to be a striking standout.

Chosen Scion - Final

The Sign of the Chosen had the ability to animate the natural world in wild and unpredictable ways. Once activated, trees and rocks would unmoor themselves from the earth and take on a extreme personalities. Lacking any clear purpose for this technology, the Watchers seemed to create these beings less as a means of enriching the lives of others and more as flagrant display of power.

Chosen Scion - WiP 1

I finished this piece over the course of a couple half days of work, so I'm just going to post all the progress shots at once :)

The first goal of working on this piece is to block in the major structural changes to the image. There's a lot about the original output that I enjoy, so I've been a little shy to go too far overwriting it. That instinct is a holdover from my process working with sketches, since the goal with traditional painting is to preserve the original energy of the work...

Chosen Scion - DD Output

I've baked out a ton of image prompts with Disco Diffusion over the past few months with the intention of polishing some of them up for release. A lot of them are cool to look at but none of them are coherent enough to include as part of my body of work without some significant cleanup. The question of how much painting they need is an open one and this piece is a forum for getting some answers.

As it stands, this looks preeeeeeeetty close to a painting I would create myself, which make...

Azrael, Death - WiP 1

Putting Azrael on the Death card for the Tarot was the biggest no-brainer ever. The main challenge is doing something new with him since he's the Angel I've illustrated most often over the years.

One of the big themes of the Death card is transition, so I wanted to have him traveling from left to right, similarly to how Eli Minaya drew him for the first Angelarium book.

Since I'm so familiar with Azrael as a character, I want to play around a little and stylize this piece more tha...

Apollyon, Angel of the Void - WiP 1

The second new Watcher that I'm working on for the Oracle deck is Apollyon!

I had a special event on the MidJourney Discord last Friday where I was demoing how I paint and doing a Q&A. I thought it would be nice to highlight a use case for the MidJourney outputs and try out a method of using the AI different from my other recent examples using init_images.

This is a collage of a number of Midjourney outputs that I'm using as a basis for Apollyon. This different process brings...

June Rewards - Discount Code

This post is predictably late, but I've got an awesome month lined up for the rest of July. While I was procrastinating on this post, I actually finished the next tarot piece, so that will be posted over the next week or so. I've also got at least 2 more pieces that should be appearing before the end of the month.

This summer is a big turning point for me and I'm very excited to be sharing this stuff with you guys.

Here's the link to the updated Dropbox downloadable rewards: 2022-07-18 15:26:14 +0000 UTC View Post

Sachiel, Angel of Coin - WiP 1

Here's my first new piece that's coming together for the upcoming Oracle of Watchers deck.

Sachiel is an Angel popularly known for being associated with wealth, so I'm using the name for the Watcher who embodies physical money. Coins are already a bit of thing in Angelarium but I've always thought about the idea of making a set of currency that represents the money that the Watchers would have minted for mankind. Sachiel would be the Angel tasked with creating those coins, so he would b...

Flowering Spirit - An Exploration of AI Assisted Art

Everybody in the art world has been messing with AI recently, and I’m no exception. Personally, I find these tools really exciting and I’ve been experimenting quite a bit with how I can integrate them into my painting process. My recent painting, “Flowering Spirit”, represents the primary way I see myself working with AI going forward so I’m going to break down what I did and why. Please enjoy!

Not Mid

First off, let’s talk about the AI I’m not usin...