Portal

post apacolyptic portal
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Materials

India ink on paper.

This took some work to upload: First, it needed rotating, which apparently requires me to stick something special in my css files (you would think that was built in), and then it needed a margin added to it, lest it eat other elements on the page. I'm not happy with the resolution, either - you can hardly tell the detail I put into it - but that last one is probably just my own cheapskate self, using her phone instead of a nice scanner, as usual.

I forget how much I love traditional ink. It's a pain in the ever loving balls to work with and tends to look horrible when you try to upload i digitally, but it's fun, gosh darn it. I just can't seem to give it up.

There are several mistakes here, but also experiments. I had never really done much in regards to wet on wet techniques, in part because I dislike the loss of control and tendency for smears and other messes my inexperience with it tends to cause. But one of the things I've been trying to do is loosen up and accept that mistakes are a part of learning, and that a peice doesn't have to be perfect to be good. Trying to chase perfection at the expense of my own sense of fun has, in fact, been a historical issue of mine, which is part of why I'm as proud of this as I am: It's not the greatest thing I've ever done, but it was a genuine joy to make and complete, and for me, that counts for a lot.

This peice is set in a post apacolyptic fantasy world of my own making (I used to have a name for it, but it's been so long that I've forgot.) the big structure forming the centerpeice is the remains of a portal, used for speedt travel by the long destroyed race that built it, whose skulls litter the area, serving as shells for their denigrated progeny, reduced to animal intellect by inbreeding and time.

The small city in the lower right is from a later apacolypse, and the tent hiding in the middle left is that of an intrepid explorer, ancestor of its scattered inhabitants.Thus, two races from two great ends gather in the same location, one doomed to ignorance, while the other retains some chance at finding newer, greater hights.