A centaur's wrath

After three months of not producing absolutely anything due to my MA program, here is another piece of my work.  

Not only due to my origin, Greek Mythical Creatures, namely centaurs, fauns, minotaurs,sirens always appealed to me, monstrous yet delicate in a way, they consist great themes for illustration. I'll never stop producing different versions of them since it's absolutely exciting for me.

In this case, I used a drawing I had done back in March 2012. It was done almost on one go and last December, I worked more on his left had, his face. So a couple of weeks ago I added his tail, and started researching on the ways I could give the feeling of the furious centaur running in the water. Fortunately by my second attempt I found a satisfying way of depicting it. I used the pump of my old and rusty fountain pen, to spill those ink drops on a piece of paper. The spills were numerous, random varying in size, exactly what I needed. Through photoshop I multiplied them and arranged them according to the needs of the theme and the structure of the image. 

Centaur's body was another issue. The strong black frame of the image somehow imposed me a body basically of no colours or neutral tones. That made the contrast between the figure and the frame stronger and added dramatic intensity to the whole image as black colour, in this form, symbolizes wrath. Wrath that stems from the figure itself. The depth of the its mouth and the spits coming out of it, are black as well. Moreover this colour opposition dictated the hue of the background, that had to be something relatively neutral but which also had to give a level of contrast with the figure. To return to the body, I've tried also to differentiate mildly the hues of  the human part from the ones of animal part. That had to be done carefully, without compromising the unity of this hybrid creature. For this, I added one extra layer of white hue on the human breast and stomach as well as in the belly of the horse body. 

Finally, for the logo, I had to experiment more that the other parts of this composition. An old piece of cloth, somewhere on my desk, fortunately not forgotten, gave me the answer. Unweaving it, I gave the sense of disintegration the wrath brings to the soul.