Mr_Tara_Nath and I were teamed up for a challenge in the Fantasy Island graphics war. Did we do good? Debatable. But we realized we should collab without prompts and deadlines and purely just for fun. So here we are, giving ourselves two weeks and finishing in three days. Took us a while to publish though.

We decided to go with just swapping bases with loose idea of something depressing. Just by the bases you can see I still have some optimism left in me. Andy though, damn man.

Go to Andy's portfolio Mingshi (Vol. 2) and see the marvelous piece he made up close and then stay for a while, you absolutely won't regret it.

Andy said: "I gave you an easy base." and that's just a blatant lie, because there is no such thing as easy for my brain. It overcomplicates by default.
Luckily, I'm left with some reason that made me think on smaller scale of manipulation.
I decided to go for a dynamic composition that relies primarily on lighting, which was a challenge. I feel more confident with light than a month ago, which was a welcome surprise.

I started working from background to the front. Unsurprisingly, background turned blue. I added some skulls and some foliage just to bring the scenery more together and everything was just easy and fun until I came to the girl. Strong colors and contrast of her clothing proved a challenge in trying to find a way to make it work in the scene. While playing with colors, those strong red flowers became orange and the idea was born. What if they would leave the fabric and float around her?

I don't know how to identify flowers so I just went with aesthetic choice. And I reigned in my impulse to literally show them leaving her clothes and just made them floating around her. And of course, they had to glow because how else to create real contrast.

To be honest, I forgot about hand in the foreground and by the time I got to it, its lighting didn't match the rest of composition and I had to improvise.

Idea is a flickering hope in the pit of death. As always it's more anxious than depressing.

Not many of those. The base was so detailed it didn't need much to turn it into a finished piece.