King of Hate

“It stares with writhing tentacles, smiling a despicable smile of almost endless teeth as it sits upon its throne… with judgement behind its gaze.”

My latest acrylic has its roots in an old drawing I did many years ago. I decided to expand on that initial concept and fill in the details. Once again, I started off with a red background (which gives it that backlit effect in some areas). From there I added tentacles and roughed out the central part of the composition.

I spent a lot of time retooling the face on this one, especially the coloring/highlights around the eyes. The mouth area also had a few versions, but I ended up with a toothy creature - almost too many to count. Eventually I added in some new tentacles and (as always) played with color throughout. The background “throne” was my girlfriend’s idea which I thought was a nice touch and a way to contrast the abomination front & center in the foreground.

In fact, the throne ultimately helped me come up with the name of this piece - the “King of Hate”. This painting took 4 (or was it 5?) Twitch sessions, but we collectively had a lot of fun during the creation process. I remember talking about “creamed beans” a lot (and I don’t even really know what those are). Seems like there was a lot of interest in this acrylic based on the number of Twitch raids and feedback from the Monkeypit crew. But it’s now time to say goodbye to this fella and move on to the next piece!

As always, be sure to join my regular Tuesday/Thursday Twitch streams at 8:30pm MST for works in progress!