Commission Complete: Lady of the Lake

This one took a while. I wish I could have spent forever on it, because every time I looked at it, I felt like something else needed to be fixed or adjusted.

Even the colour scheme, I would have changed a bit if I'd had another month. I would have lowered the saturation a little bit and added more contrast.

That said, I am happy with it. I wouldn't send it off to my client if it fell under my accepted level of quality. Thank goodness for deadlines, which prevent me from obsessing too much. Honestly, nothing is ever done. I'm always trying to find ways to make it better.

I did some research for this one. I knew a little bit already about the Lady of the Lake, who gives Arthur Excalibur. Also named Nimue, or sometimes Viviane, she's called a witch by the locals in the Arthurian legend.

My client's specs for this piece were that she be halfway emerged from the water, in armor, holding up her sword, and surrounded by fairies. Some of these are a slight stretch from the myth as I know it, but it's all good.

Specifically, I found more links to Wales than anywhere else in Britain, so I picked a Welsh lake for the background scenery. Her hair, I made red, because that is the popular colour association to witches in history. The fairies double as lotus flowers, so that they can hide and blend in with the surrounding flora, though they dance gracefully in the wind as ballerinas, whose poses I used for their bodies.

Her armor is leather, carved with celtic knots and designs. Excalibur glints in the fading sun as she holds it up to the dying light.

End result, I didn't need to tell these details to my client. I only showed her the picture, and she's happy. It's supposed to arrive to her in the mail any time now. This is always the nervous part for me, because I can package things as well as humanly possible, but I have no control over the safety of their transit.

Fingers crossed!