#postcreated Pride

[sysirauta]

Falscher Engel

It took a shape of an angel and a crown like of a god

It mocks them both in its life of flesh and blood

[sysirauta]

Everyone look at this bastard of a character made magnificent! I do love seeing Pride in various styles, made by others. I wanted to see Pride in @drachenmagier 's signature style and to have a new physical art piece to hang on my wall, and man I am happy for the results.

Commissioned creature illustration. :D That was quite the fun challenge! 

A4, mostly markers and fineliners on bristol paper. 

Prints and Commissions Twitter - deviantART - Insta - Kofi - Mastodon - Artgram

[grandhotelabyss]

And for our audiovisual Monday, I just found this interview with Alan Moore on RT from only two months ago. I’ve been reading William Blake—working my way through the Norton Critical Edition, which contains the illuminated books in their entirety, with plenty of other odds and ends—and went looking to see if YouTube had Moore’s spoken-word performance about Blake, Angel Passage, which I’ve never seen anywhere in any format. But they only have the final track, where Moore declares of Blake, “It’s not enough to study or revere him, only be him,” about which I’m not entirely sure.[*] I have my un-Blakean side too. I’ve never seen an angel or summoned a demon. 

Why do occultists always summon demons, by the way? Do they also invite murderers and rapists to their homes on the material plane? If the one, why not the other? In truth, I went to Catholic school; I saw The Exorcist very early in life and then many, many times after that; so I will not be calling down the powers of the air. 

Anyway, esoteric Twitter microcelebrity Logo Daedalus recently complained that no one talks about James Joyce’s essay on Blake. But Richard Ellmann talked about it in his mammoth, landmark biography of Joyce, contextualizing it alongside its companion piece on Defoe. I wrote in my essay on Ellmann:

Synthesizing Defoe’s realism with Blake’s romanticism (“While he took pride in grounding his art like Defoe in fact, he insisted also with Blake on the mind’s supremacy over all it surveyed,” summarizes Ellmann), Joyce held that the artist’s duty was to transfigure truth in the crucible of his imagination and produce a new world out of this one. This act, which both preserves the world and inspires us to change it, which saves the was and incites the will be, what Stephen Dedalus calls “the postcreation,” cannot be achieved on the basis of mollifying lies or blunted language.

Realism and idealism, naturalism and symbolism—for that matter, Athens and Jerusalem. The identity of opposites held together by the sustaining tension of the artwork, the radiant force-field of aesthetics. 

What I find remarkable about the above interview with Moore is that exactly halfway through it, he gently repents having popularized the Guy Fawkes mask in V for Vendetta because, in his judgment, the anarchist hackers of Anonymous, who’d adopted it as their symbol of revolution, recklessly incited civil violence in the guise of liberation during the Arab Spring. 

Speaking as we were of Irishmen, I here thought not of Joyce, who tempered his Blakean idealism with Defoe’s realism, but of Yeats, who really was trying to be Blake; and as Blake at first hailed the revolutionary spirits of 1776 and 1789 in America: A Prophecy, so Yeats, in Cathleen ni Houlihan, dramatized the avatar of Ireland calling her sons to sacrifice themselves to free the captive land from the English, a bloody summons the poet would live to regret in “The Man and the Echo”:

All that I have said and done, Now that I am old and ill, Turns into a question till I lie awake night after night And never get the answers right. Did that play of mine send out Certain men the English shot?

Do these tragic lines—which I recall Christopher Hitchens applying to himself after a young soldier inspired by his writing was killed in Iraq—mitigate the writer’s responsibility? In his little book on Blake, the Christian apologist Chesterton, who appreciates Blake’s opposition to materialism but is contemptuous of his gnosticism, comments with bland irony,

like most of the men of genius of that age and school, like Coleridge and like Shelley, he seems to have been slightly sickened with the full sensational actuality of the French tragedy; and somewhat unreasonably having urged the rebels to fight, complained because they killed people.

Then again, Chesterton also says in an aside that “witches and warlocks” were “somewhat excusably” killed in European history, which returns us to the warlock Moore’s regrets. But he never portrays a successful political revolution in his work, only a mental and spiritual one. That’s probably as much as poets and artists should advocate, at least if they don’t want to “lie awake night after night.”

_________________________

[*] YouTube does have Moore’s older performance pieces, The Moon and Serpent Grand Egyptian Theater of Marvels, which sort of enacts his occult initiation, to include his summoning of the demon regent Asmodeus, and The Birth Caul, a Romantic autobiography occasioned by his mother’s death in a “strange hot year that stank of lioness,” and (like his first and second prose novels) a psychogeography of Northampton. I owned these two on CD 20 years ago, but who knows what became of those artifacts. Here is a complete guide to Moore’s spoken-word catalogue.

[sysirauta]

The metallic lantern head geometry bastard is 12 years today. At this point I've accepted that he is not going leave from my headspace likely ever.

This is a gouache painting on black paper that I painted a month ago.

[sysirauta]

Pride the creature but young. Less clutter, more neck fluff. Probably slightly less creepy. Looks ridiculous like awkward teen phase should.

[sysirauta]

Look at this thing! Look at it and all those twisty limbs and subtle iridescence! I just got the original via mail on the other day and it is perfect.

Pride keeps giving and apparently pushes people out of dry art zones.

This is commissioned art that I made for DeviantArt buddy Sysirauta. The character is their Postcreated entity called Pride, a shape-shifter of mercurial temperament and exquisite taste. Sysirauta wanted Pride to have a cup of coffee, but left the rest of the composition up to me. They provided excellent reference material, so managing all the twisty limb-tentacles, wings, fur, feathers, and metal was no problem!

In fact, I really had fun with this piece. It was challenging and refreshing, and I worked with a color palette I have not used before. I've been going through an artistic dry spell - I have plenty of ideas, but insufficient energy to do much with 'em. The Pride project managed to crowbar me out of that mindset to a great degree, and the art process is coming along more easily than it has in the last couple of years.

I made this with Prismacolor pencils.

[sysirauta]

First Dance

Joy of youth and a promise for the future.

[sysirauta]

I don't think that I ever put the refs of the things here but here we go.

Art is from 2016-2017 and some details may have changed but nothing too critical so it's good enough for now, creatures themselves are very much recognizable.

[sysirauta]

Last Dance

Betrayal, separation, hate, and bittersweet memories never letting go.

[sysirauta]

-points- The thing! And it's still amazing!

Very nearly there! Still some rendering and polishing to do (looking at you, wings!) but I’m pretty pleased, considering we have some textures here you don’t normally find in my work. Glossy! And magenta! Also might be the closest I’ve drawn to something mechanical in.... decades? This was a really nice excercise in something new, which is one of my favorite things about commissions. Without you folks, I’d be in a permanent rut. Thank you!

Character belongs to Sysirauta on deviantart.

[sysirauta]

Just quick sketch of Pride from a few years back.

[sysirauta]

Pride but dravene.

Ironically, Pride is still not the kind of person to wear a magenta fur collar so I compromised and made a black one.

[sysirauta]

Trying to draw something, so here are Pride and Envy as (my version of) kirins.

Kirins have clear sexual dimorphism but it worked well with them without needing to stretch my own rules. Bright colors and pure black are male-coded, so Pride would just be 'tall dude with oddly long tail and long horns'. And he would use that third horn like a knife. Envy is a mix of traits (bodyshape, pale color, visible tailtip and fangs are female-coded, bright colors, decorative feathers and third horn are male-coded). Scales and beard are neutral traits that just happen sometimes.

[sysirauta]

Look, it's my thing and it's very cool!

Traditional art commission for dA user and fellow ARPG guild member Sysirauta, with their very neat character Pride. Really liked working on this. c:

Original piece was sent to them.

[sysirauta]

As per usual procedure, here are all the guys [gender neutral] in same post.

[sysirauta]

Due to the actual main reference sheet being traditional art, it has apparently confused people all these years so I finally yielded and made simpleish plain flat color versions for clarity. These are supposed to go with actual ref sheet so focus is on flat colors (and material placements).

I want to say that I absolutely don't require any exact hues, like, just do something along the guidelines. I make only traditional art and there's no hex codes or flat coloring comparable to digital flat, I don't require that. But hopefully this helps to figure out how to color a sin, since ref sheet images are heavily shaded and textured.