If you don't know who Ami Thompson is yet, or have never seen this series before, I truly encourage you to go give her a follow and scroll back through her posts because she's incredible. She has been drawing this pair of a queen and her faithful blood knight for quite some time. The whole thing is gorgeous and I need the show or book of this whole thing at some point. Ami's use of body language and expressions and shot compositions are really effective and expressive storytellers. If you, like me, have been frothing at the mouth about this illustration series for its duration, or even if you haven't there is so much communicated in this image even with just the two characters taking up the whole frame.
This piece impresses me as a really strong combination of clean graphic elements and rich abstract textures. I'm a particular fan of the repeated dot patterns that appear in the upper elements of the water, making it feel like embroidered tapestry as much as water. Composition-wise there's a really great sense of line directing the eye to that top left area where the concentration of detail is really high, and the gold-blue contrast is augmenting this.
quruiqing here is going some absolutely incredible things here with colour. Tonally, there are so few touches that reach into the lower half of the tonal spectrum available to you in digital form and most of the colours are sitting either around 50% luminosity or high up on that scale. Instead this really strong use of colour temperature is defining all of these forms and is employing this pearlescence in the shadows to show reflected light really effectively, both the turquoises reflected by the water and the touches of orange for the sun's bounce light. This is not even mentioning yet that these character designs are really cool. All of these big thick ropes and tassles, the enormous fluffy collar, the veil of ribbons: all sick. I love the ties built between characters that have these dangling beaded elements to their designs, and especially the two who get the giant shoulder horns in their design.
I wanted to put this piece in last week, but Tiffany had only posted it to Instagram, which is a little harder to rip images off of. Tiffany is an artist whose career I've been closely following for some years now. I own originals of hers. She's been doing really great work with comic covers lately, so I was so happy to see her work get picked up for Magic: The Gathering, finally. I love how effectively she has communicated the surface of the liquid in this image with these slight distortions. The intense greens and these subtle purple touches create a great oil slick effect on the the whole thing. Also, you know I love tubes.
There is truly no end to the monthly hashtag art challenges on social media, and while I truly will never have the time for any of them, I'm grateful for their existence because it means I have a neverending stream of great stuff like this to look at. If this is digital, Karma is doing incredible work to keep the paper and pastel textures consistent across the whole thing. If its not, Karma is doing incredible things to make this look luminous. Either way, the opalescence of this image is everything. Really creamy texture and colour and its half of this really beautiful contrast paired with the character's skin. Note the rich purples that reflect into the skin on the torso, cause by light bouncing off the hair/plants.
Sometimes its wild getting to watch Dave Rapoza's career. I will probably do a larger post at some point, but it is wild how good Dave was when I first found his work in 2010 on the ConceptArt.org forums when he went by Mr. Delicious and how much better he keeps getting. I've seen a bunch of stuff from Dave's work on the Blackbirds TTRPG and all I can say about it is: how much fucking money do these people have!? They've commissioned Dave for so many pieces to a degree that must cost tens of thousands of dollars. My guy here is truly incredible at taking some 90s OVA vibes and then extrapolating that into these incredible, almost baroque image collages.