Beautiful Monster - Art Explosion Week 9 contest submission

I really hoped to have colored in this pen and ink drawing in time for the contest deadline, but I am nowhere near finishing that part of the project... so I submit for the judges' inspection a beautiful monster in pen and ink.

I use a hot pink background when I am cleaning up a scanned image because the high contrast helps me define edges. I kinda like the look of this bad boygirl against the hot pink so I am leaving it:

First let's talk about the elephants in the room. I get a lot of questions about what seem to be phallic and vulvic elements in my art. So yes, that is an alien organism penis-equivalent and vulva-equivalent sticking out to the upper left and lower right respectively. This is an alien hermaphroditic sexually reproducing organism. And also, tentacles. This is what I consider beautiful, so deal with it :)

I am going to share my work in progress for the color version - this is a LONG way from finished. I will be working up the contrast between the shadowed and light areas to make the light source (coming in from the upper right) more obvious and to give this thing more of a three dimensional feel:

When I get the coloring done I am going to apply reptile and amphibian and sea slug and jelly fish textures to various parts of this using the Deep Dream Generator. I did a proof of concept applying reptile and toad textures to a very simple tentacle drawing I whipped up and colored in PhotoShop:

Simple tentacle drawing

Tentacle drawing with reptile and toad textures applied with the Deep Dream Generator

The Deep Dream Generator only allows a maximum of .95 MP resolution (e.g. 950px by 1000px) so I plan on cutting up the master image (which was scanned in at 300 ppi to allow for eventual print use - I am going to use this thing in an upcoming D&D adventure I am self publishing, although this was created new for this contest first - the original image is 2896px by 2437px) into sections and applying textures to smaller sections of the drawing, then combining them all into the finished product. This will be the first time I use this technique to bypass the .95MP resolution limit of the Deep Dream Generator and create a truly HD Dream image - I am excited!

Stay tuned for a future post with the final colored image and final Deep Dream textured image.

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Cheers - Carl