Description

Alizarin
Keeper of infinite knowledge
Passion and violence incarnate
The crow of crimson

Well, for a number of months now, I've had a very abstract idea of doing a dark moody-looking piece with alot of red and black. I also had been wanting to somehow incorperate crows, ravens or blackbirds into it since those birds have always intrigued me. Recently these ideas finally materialized into this, something dark, crimson and bishounen ^_____^. It was also time for a break from my usual rainboy-ish candy colors, so a good solid primary color like red was a welcome change. I also noticed that alot of my previous work up until now, especially the more recent stuff, was lacking in detailed backgrounds, so I tried to do more in terms of atmosphere and background in this one too. I'd say there's probably some Howl's Moving Castle influence in it XD, as well as general gothic influence.

Up until this point I had been fighting with this huge art block that lasted like 6 months or more. During that time I began to dislike almost all of my work, both old and new, and was coming to the conclusion that I had to make some serious changes. How long it took me to even decide what those changes would be is another story altogether LOL, and I'll save you the extra rambling ^_~ not that I haven't done alot of rambling already. I think this piece helped lead me out of that art block =]

I was going to write a bunch of backstory on this character, but then decided that I wouldn't force a story onto him. Whenever I had the first inspiring glimpse of this image before I began on it, it was simply a stand-alone image, left up to the viewer to interpret. So that is what I will leave it
But, anyway, that's about it. I hope you like him =3

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Photoshop CS
(based on a cleaned up pencil drawing)