Malkuth - Progress and History (Patreon)

This is an example of the sorts of progress shots you can see if you become a backer. Click the attachment to see the full sized image. This piece was surprisingly straightforward. Despite not having a lot of content in the sketch. In the first step, I have already chopped off the head I drew initially. It was a weird set of geometric shapes, but it wasn't pleasing me and it didn't really mean anything. I tried to imagine what would mean more to me as an image. The orb with a city inside spoke to me, though, at this point I didn't know why. Though I'm using this piece to kick off my Tree of Life series. It was originally just a random tribute to one of my favorite artists, Zdzilaw Beksinski. The decision to rename it after Malkuth came after a chance conversation at Dragoncon last year. That was the spark to start researching the Tree more and was the impetus behind this project. The drawing was very simple but I had a very easy time translating the simple lines into subdivisions for the figure. Digging into accidental marks and laying in simple grunge textures I was able to add increasingly fine levels of detail to each pass I took over the painting. This process has ultimately led me to the working process that I'm using on the rest of the Sephirot. The visual language of mixing organic and geometric shapes is something that is present in my most relevant work throughout Angelarium, but it wasn't until I starting going more abstract with the figure that I begin to get a better picture about how this language is best expressed.