Here’s another one of my paintings. I actually made this one a couple of months before my painting of Angel 0. It was my first attempt at a landscape, and I sort of went for kind of an evil wasteland thing. It turned out pretty darn well if I do say so myself. I really threw myself into the project. Probably because I started it not too long after my mom died. And no, the fact that the painting is of an evil landscape in no way reflects my mood at that time. It was just a scene that I was inspired to do, probably from watching the movie version of Return of the King. At least I’m pretty sure I had seen that film on TV around that time. I know I listened to the soundtrack while working on it, even when I did the original sketch. It was over a year ago, so I don’t remember all of the details.

Anyway, the painting turned out more or less like my original sketch, but there were a lot of changes along the way. Most of them were my own idea, and a few were suggestions by my painting instructor. A lot of stuff was added, like that tree with the demonic eye, and those vehicle parts in front of the cave mouth. One of the things that I added early on, like when the actual painting was started, was that light blue portal in the upper left hand corner. That portal, by the way, is the exit out of that horrible dimension.

By now, you’re probably all wondering why this painting is in the Sailor Moon category. See those two figures in the lower left hand corner? Do they look familiar to anyone? Anyone care to guess who they are? Well, you don’t have to. For one thing, the names are in the tags, and I’m just going to tell you all. It’s Sailor Uranus and Sailor Neptune. I was in no way planning to put those two in when I started the painting, but one morning the idea just came to me. So the painting ended up becoming a climactic scene in a story that I had half formed in my head.

In this scene, Uranus is trying to keep Neptune from being sucked into that horrible vortex in the ground, which I had to repaint a few times. All the while they have to deal with the terrible cave beast. The vortex, by the way, is a trap that the two accidentally triggered when they were trying to get to the portal out of the dimension. I ran with this story for a while, but in a month or so I got bored with it and wanted to work on Angel 0. Plus I got pretty sick at the end of that year and couldn’t do too much. I came down with some sort of respiratory infection or something. The point is I never got started on writing the actual story. I may have to do that sometime. Enjoy.