Title: “Contest Entry – The Bulb & The Blight”
Medium: Digital Painting
School of Art: Fantasy
Original Size: 8.5″x11″
Creation Date: 2011
This was done entirely in Photoshop with the mouse which blows my mind now because I cannot stand using it. This also came with a description written when it was submitted for review for the “RIFT Create A Colossal Contest” hosted by DeviantArt.com in 2011. While it is an older piece with older views, I still love the way that the upper background is done with the white dove soaring through the light cascading from the trees. That along with noticing that this was all done with the mouse instead of the tablet was another reason I had to post it.
Original Description:
After playing several MMO’s and having my share of battles as all sorts of classes, I felt that I had seen it all. When this contest came around I thought back to all of the strategies and expectations of faulty or amazing group members and found myself remembering that I hadn’t seen a boss you had to kill with kindness.
This boss has two sides to it. The obvious boss with a slew of minions to take care of and also the generous one willing to buff you if you heal it. Now I haven’t played Rift yet but it is on my list of games to play when I can muster up some time for myself. However I did do my homework and watched multiple videos that displayed the way that the rifts open and the baddies that came with them.
I chose to do the life rift. Let’s say the rift opens from the sky and spits out a giant bulb. The bulb is the boss. Each time its planted it has some sort of deformity, in this case blight, in others it could just be weak from the landing, (who knows) I figure it opens up imagination and problem solving on the fly. As the blight tries to take over and make a super colossus, the bulb is dying. So there would be two boss bars to watch. If the super colossus kills the bulb its game over. The bulb must prevail.
The more the bulb is healed and the higher health points it receives it starts growing new chutes that generate new plants that give random buffs as they open. Once the bulb is completely healed it regenerates new life in the infected area and turns back into the closed bulb it once was. After that I figure it would disintegrate and bless everyone in the surrounding area with a greater buff that say could last all day or something. I hadn’t thought about an end result.
This piece took on many forms during this whole process. This is certainly not the creature I had drawn up to begin with. In fact my whole thought process originally stemmed from a mother nature scenario that they formed into a creature that I imagined as older since I couldn’t imaging mother nature being entirely young anymore since the Earth is… well how old? Not to mention many games are based on the place we call home, surrounded by new forms and mutations of sorts. Anyhow eventually out of frustration I scrapped the drawn version of this and remade the bulb creature. I had been so involved with this colossus being able to regenerate life that I had surprised myself when I reread the contest requirements. It needed to be a boss…hard and awesome. I thought about setting it aside and working on another one but I put so much of myself into it… so much thought and determination, that it bothered me to make that commitment to another piece. I thought about it and Blight was added. Blight is this frightening creature that surrounds the Bulb; I designed it to surround the Bulb and have this dark-non-figurative-chiseled yet blob typed mass to it.
Plentiful Designs 