What Waits, Also Watches

“It festers in the dark beyond comprehension, a bloated mass of writhing textures and malignant purpose. Its eyes, slick and unblinking, glisten with a knowing hunger—patient, ancient, and terribly aware. Beneath layers of bruised and glimmering flesh, its mouth yawns with rows of rotted teeth, as if grinning at some cosmic joke no man should ever hear. It does not move, yet it watches; it does not speak, yet it waits”.

If you’ve been watching my Twitch stream the past couple of weeks, you may have seen my new work “what waits, also watches” materialize in front of your eyes. I took a slightly different path than some of my previous acrylics. In this one, I “zoomed in” on the creature details but the approach I took was also different.

For this acrylic, I initially started with a red background and then began layering in some black and white underpainting to define values and shapes. Then I updated some other areas to make them more interesting and began building up colors on top of those. I know this metamorphosis (e.g. fully painting over areas) can be alarming for folks tuning into the stream, but as they say “trust the process”!

The area at the upper left went through a few iterations (initially a yellow-green “matrix”) but I’m really happy with how it turned out with the red secondary lighting. The color of the eyeballs also went through a few changes, initially blue, then a dull grey cataract color, before ending up as a crimson red. I added an extra row of teeth at the bottom for good measure.

All told, I’m really happy with how this one turned out. Be sure to join my regular Tuesday/Thursday Twitch streams at 8:30pm MST for works in progress!