Shooting Horrors from the Beyond with Eliza Sica, Part 3

Jaguar Queen. Digital Paint version. Model: Eliza Sica

I am still working on pictures from my photo session with actress and model Eliza Sica. I have long wanted to do a Woman with Large Cat picture. 

This is a perennial favorite among artists. Frank Frazetta's magical Cat Girl is probably the most well known. Frazetta painted several different versions of Cat Girl, and the final one is pure magic. The different versions are in a new Frazetta art book published by Vanguard. I highly recommend it. It was sold out at the publisher, but I managed to buy a copy from Amazon in Germany. A second printing is in the works.

I did a bit of research, and one painting that left me thunderstruck was Julie Bell's Sanctuary. If you click the link, you'll see that it looks good even on Instagram. Quite a feat.

Another important source of inspiration was an oil painting by Régis Moulun.

Jaguar Queen. Photorealistic version. Model: Eliza Sica

I am quite happy with how Jaguar Queen turned out. Eliza did a great job, and the jaguar didn't eat anyone.

Glory Road. Photorealistic version. Model: Eliza Sica

The first edition of Robert Heinlein's Glory Road was published in 1963. In 1974, Delta Science-Fiction published a Swedish translation. I was twelve years old at the time, and a voracious reader. I hesitated a bit before borrowing the book at the library, because on the cover it had a painting of a scantily clad woman who had apparently slayed a dinosaur-like creature with a bow and arrow.

I did not know it at the time, but the artist who had painted the cover was Bruce Pennington. Pennington's image stayed with me through the years. I do not want to be derivative, but now and then, I recreate something another artist has made, to learn, or to get it out of my system.

When Eliza and I decided to do the photo session, I took the opportunity to make a version of the same scene in the book, heavily influenced by Pennington's painting.

I made some changes. The woman in Pennington's painting, Star, is blonde, and the man walking behind her, Rufo, is white-haired. Eliza is a redhead, so my version of Star would get red hair too.

Rufo, despite looking a lot older than Star, is Star's son, so I gave him somewhat faded red hair too.

The picture was fun to make, and I really needed to get Pennington's picture out of my system. If I do another Glory Road inspired picture, I think I can free myself from Pennington's book cover painting, and do something more original.

Train to Hell. Model: Eliza Sica

Train to Hell is a Lovecraftian horror picture. A detective is investigating a series of disappearances from underground train stations, and suddenly finds herself face to tentacles with an ancient horror.

We shot three different pictures with Eliza as the same detective, so there are more pictures in the same series on the way.

Crash Site Battle. Photorealistic version. Model: Eliza Sica

The somewhat unimaginatively named Crash Site Battle belongs to the same series of pictures as Castaway, a picture I wrote about in the second part of this article series.

The idea is that it is a couple of years after the crash landing in Castaway. Our protagonist has made a place for herself in a tribe of humans. If you wonder what a tribe of humans are doing on another planet, I suggest you read Jack Vance's books about Adam Reith and his adventures on Tschai.

You might notice that there is a lot of stuff going on in this picture. As the battle on the beach unfolds, a starship is coming to the rescue. Whether they will have time to land before the battle is over, that is a different question.

If you look at the crashed, and rusted, starship in the background to the right, there is a second battle in progress. A tentacled sea creature has attacked a woman and her, remarkably pterosaur-like, flying steed, just after they landed on the wreckage. In the sky above, her friends are moving in to help.

Even though I knew you'd barely be able to see it, I set the background battle up carefully. In a future photo session, I might make that battle the focus of a photo series.

For now, the only thing I have is a quick sketch of one of the riders.

Quick storyboard of one of the flying combatants in the background battle.

That is it, for now. I hope you enjoyed looking at the pictures, and wasn't too bored with my scribblings.

My plans right now, is to start planning a new photo session, and finish one or two more pictures from the photo session with Eliza Sica. I have also begun a rewrite, and translation into English, of one of my books. That will take quite some time to finish...and then, of course, there is my day job.

If you haven't seen part 2 of this blog series, click on this link!

Be seeing you!

Shooting Horrors from the Beyond with Eliza Sica, Part 1

 

When the Sleeper Awakes (a.k.a. The Frozen)

Eliza Sica (Instagram: @eriizas) is an actress and model I had contact with before the pandemic. Recently, we decided to have a carefully socially distanced photo session.

I maintain a catalog of my storyboards in PDF format. I sent it to Eliza, and we set up a meeting at a café in Gothenburg. (Again - a carefully socially distanced meeting.) We went through the storyboards, Eliza selected the ones she was interested in shooting, and we discussed what preparations we needed, and how to do the shoot itself.

We also discussed our contract. Even for a non-commercial shoot, a contract, although painfully boring, is important. Due to the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), it is a legal requirement in the EU. Beyond that, a contract makes clear the rights and responsibilities of both model and photographer.

I am slowly gathering material for a book about creative photography, and a contract is important for that reason too. When I send my book manuscript to a publisher, I want to be able to show the contracts too.

 The shoot itself went well, despite a mistake on my side: I hadn't made a shot list! This created extra work, because it meant we had to move the studio flashes much more often than we would otherwise have had to do. Eliza was patient though, so it worked. Next time, a shot list will be a priority on my part.

I got the idea for When the Sleeper Awakes from two different stories, both by by H.G. Wells: The Sleeper Awakes and The Time Machine:

What if a group of people are cryogenically frozen, and forgotten forgotten for many millenia when our civilization collapses. Eventually, the cryotubes begin to fail, and only one remains, when it is discovered by Morlocks...

There is one more source of inspiration: I re-read Morlock Night by K.W Jeter some time ago, and that that inspired me to work on a set of Steampunk Time Travel pictures. That got me thinking about H.G. Wells and his stories, and that eventually lead to When the Sleeper Awakes.

You might wonder where I got hold of an old run-down cryogenic facility, a Morlock, and a couple of desiccated skeletons.

I built the environment using commercially available 3D models. I did quite a bit of customization, adding rust, fungi, and molds.

I created the Morlock by mixing commercially available morphs of a Genesis 8 base character. As for the desiccated bodies...it is probably best you don't know.

Creating the Eliza's frozen look was fun. I studied videos on how to create a frozen look, but in the end, I discarded those methods and went my own way:

I rendered the door of the cryotube separately from everything else, because I wanted to build layers of frost on the body and on the door separately. First I matched luminosity and color tones of Eliza and the cryogenic tube. Then I desaturated Sica's skin, and added several layers of frost to skin and hair. After that, I added frost to the cryogenic tube door in the same manner.

For pictures like these, I often use Dynamic Auto-Painter to create a very colorful digital painting version, which I then blend in with the original picture. That gave the picture its final, very strong colors.

The Horror in the Library

The Horror in the Library is of course inspired by H.P. Lovecrafts Cthulhu mythos. Again, both the thing lurking in the shadows and the library are commercial 3D models.

The main thing to get right here, was the light on the monster. I wanted to show that it was definitely not human, but I also wanted to hide the face. What we do not see can be more frightening than what we do see.

There are many more pictures coming up the next few weeks, and perhaps months, given how slow I am when editing.

Long medium to long range plans for the pictures include the book I mentioned, and also exhibitions. For now though, I'll focus on editing the other pictures from the photo session.

Be seeing you!

An Evening in R'Lyeh - Intermediate version

An Evening in R'Lyeh. I am experimenting with 360 panoramas again. This is an intermediate version. I am analyzing it, to figure out what to fix, and how.

More to come...

Kyla: Interrupted Service

I noticed that I was slipping back into my old habit of showing a scene either before, or after, something happens, but not during. So, I decided to break the habit.

My previous Kyla blog post showed her facing off with a giant Deep One, built more like the Abomination than the creatures H.P. Lovecraft describes.

I wrote that I would trim the Deep Ones down a bit, and that is what I did. I kept the bodybuilding one, but all the others are a more normal size. As you can see, I also made sure that particular Deep One won't bother anyone again.

I do have a couple more ideas for a large Deep One though, so he just may reincarnate...eventually.

The title Interrupted Service is a joke. My son would tell me it is a very lame joke, if I asked him about it, so I won't.

If you look to the left, you'll notice a foot and a pair of legs. I won't tell you who it is, but it is the same guy who is in trouble over here. Click the link if you are curious. Some people just won't stay rescued.

I had quite another idea in mind when I started out with this picture, but I got into trouble, and decided to simplify a bit. I haven't given up on the original idea though, so I might do some more work on the same theme.

Kyla vs. Deep One (Cthulhu Mythos Meets Cavewoman)

One more Kyla picture. Kyla vs. a Deep One. A very, very muscle-bound Deep One. :-)

The interesting thing to me, is that if I can create a passable Deep One, it opens up a whole range of storytelling. The Cthulhu mythos provides rich, and partially copyright free (check very carefully what is free to use, and what is not, if you do anything commercial) material to base stories on, or to weave in as story elements.

I will hold a Photos Inspired by Books event on the 12th of May, in Gothenburg. This picture isn't a photo, of course, but the important thing is the sources of inspiration. In this case:

• The Cthulhu Mythos created by H.P. Lovecraft, and developed by many different writers.
• Marvel/DC Comics superhero comics. Yeah, there is a reason for those overdeveloped muscles. Check out Marvels Abomination.
• The Cavewoman comic by Budd Root. Technically, Cavewoman belongs to the Lost World literary genre, which is a sub-genre of Science-Fiction. By the way, so does Jurassic Park and King Kong.

So, there are three major literary sources of inspiration for this picture. I believe that in order to create something new and interesting, whether it is a picture, or anything else, you need to stoke the fires of your imagination with many different kinds of fuel. Indeed, creativity is the ability to deconstruct those sources, in order to build something new.

There is more of course. I have written before, about how Kyla herself is a result of playing with genre conventions, and flipping gender roles. Kyla fights monsters, she is no damsel in distress. (She has been quite distressing to some people in Facebook art groups though, who prefer more demure, and more fully dressed, women.)

A little bit about the technical side of creating the picture:

The Deep One is a Michael 4 3D mesh with Creature Creator and The Freak morphs. I used the Daz Studio Leather shader for the skin, and changed the skin color.

I rendered with Iray in Daz Studio, tweaked the picture (strategically placed hair and a bit extra brightness and contrast) in Affinity Photo. I worked in 16 bit mode to get a little bit of extra punch in the colors.

Finally, I painted the whole picture in Dynamic Auto-Painter.

Just like there were three different sources of inspiration for the idea, there were three different tools that contributed to creating the actual picture.

Here is the original 3D scene, as I built it in Daz Studio. Whether you prefer the painted version or the original is a matter of taste really. (I doubt anyone who does not like either reads this far.)

While working on this picture, I was actually more concerned with the lighting than the scene itself. The reason? Because this picture is a warmup picture for a slightly more complex picture that I haven't done yet.

Be seeing you!