Showing posts with label Crown. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Crown. Show all posts

Saturday, September 6, 2025

Queen of Pentacles - Doomsday Dream Clan

Queen of Pentacles Tarot Card Concept
The many meanings of the Queen of Pentacles tarot card.

This is another drawing from the archives.

Originally the concept sketch was made in 2010 when I was on a team of artists called the Doomsday Dream Clan. We participated in a team challenge in the now dead conceptart.org website. The challenge was to draw cards from a tarot deck and this is one of the cards we selected to paint. The intent was to create a complete deck from the cards drawn by all the different teams of artists who participated in the contest. I do not know if the deck was ever completed, but I know that some stunning work was done during the challenge and some famous pro artists participated in the contest.

This version of the Queen of Pentacles depicted here did not make it into our final work or submission, but was instead an original concept done by me when we first started to get some ideas. In August 2025 I decided to push this concept to a more complete state and this is the result. I have been meaning to go back and post our completed works from the Doomsday Dream Clan on a separate subsection of this website.

This project was a lot of fun to work on, and I do think we did some really good work. I honestly think that I did my best work while working with other artists. Maybe now it doesn't look so impressive, but in 2010 this was the peak of my ability. After we completed the challenge the complete lack of votes from the community was totally demoralizing. It was another showcase of how popularity skewed perspective and affected the voting results. I'm not saying we should have won, but we were close and our entries were very unique. I suffered a few years of burnout after this challenge completed where I didn't draw very much.

Burnout is a common thing for many artists and the causes may be different. For me usually art comes in waves, or as I like to call them "dumps", where I push and improve massively over a few weeks or months, but then have to take a few years to pull back and gather more energy for the next push. I'm now old, and I wish I had spent more time and effort in improving early as an artist.

The end is coming soon, maybe like most artists my work will be more valued after I'm dead. Cheers to that!

Tuesday, April 2, 2024

King of Men

King of Men
Digital painting made during Hurricane Ike exile in 2008.

I lived in Houston at the time and decided to ride it out on the North side of town with some friends. The storm was intense but I've been through worse before and after. The giant pine trees that crashed down and sliced through some homes were probably the most dangerous thing at the time. I do not miss hurricanes, but now I have wildfires to contend with!

This drawing was inspired my my friend Alexander who prompted me to try drawing a big fat pig with a crown, intended to symbolize the rot in our society and how we often prop up terrible and corrupt leaders. While our political views do not agree, as is often the case with my friends, the general sentiment is something we can all get behind. Our leaders suck, they are all compromised, as more time passes it becomes more an more obvious that the system in the United States is not working for the regular people. A few years later we truly would get our big fat golden pig on the Throne, to make us all great again! Anyways, this can turn into a long essay, lets just end it here...