3 long months of toiling on and off on this Neoclassicist master study by the majestic Herbert James Draper.
Have always wanted to make this tribute piece ever since Icarus was announced but was derailed by a roller coaster of life and emotions up until this year. Then, I visited Monet's exhibition and it reminded me why I love and found art fascinating in the first place.
Still dk if it's worth the amount of time spent lmfao but I can say I'm very satisfied with how it turn out. Learnt a couple things from him heh.
Also before any jokers decide to come at me - yes he's pale in the game but logic says you don't stay pale going so close to the damn sun
i know i said Helios was gonna be next, but back when i made the fan design for Eos i gotta admit that i absolutely HATED what i ended up with but had been working on it for so long i just went ahead and posted it anyway
turns out y'all really liked it! and were very nice about it and it made me feel much better about it, too
still, there are definitely some design decisions i made then that i do not at all agree with so, today, i present to y'all Eos 2.0!
newer, better and much closer to what i had envisioned!
do you agree? is it a glow up? am i tripping and totally wrong? lemme know what you think! if you wish to!
i will now, under the cut, go on a ramble about the process and my ideas. if you don't care or wanna interpret the design on your own, don't mind that!
if you wish to proceed here's a warning: it's pretty long! i think.
so, working on Eos was a JOURNEY back then
i went through SO MANY passes and would always end up hating them in the end. even when i finally did end up posting it, as previously mentioned
i don't have all of them in this computer, but i'll talk a little bit about the few screenshots i do have saved
from the start i was referencing every single shread of a mention we've ever had of her in the game
the most helpful one being, of course, her umbral flames aspect
it was good to have some things to start with! with every design, up to the final one, i would always try and reference the colors and symbols
i also didn't know much about the goddess at all, so i read a LOT about her to reference her myth and descriptions as much as i could
my goal with this was to make it not just a fan design, but one that also felt accurate to the game in both appearance and the attention to detail
this
was the very first iteration of her. this one i forgive a little cause i knew it wouldn't be the final one. i just needed to put down on the canvas all of the different ideas i had and sort them out later
very messy, very convoluted, but it was good exercise and features many of the things i knew i HAD to include. y'know: the wings, the heart motifs (she's a goddess with a lot of love to give), i knew i wanted something with the clouds, the ROSY FINGERS (y'all caught onto that one) among others
i knew i wanted the wings. the goddess is described sometimes as having a horse, but Selene's got that covered already. she also had a chariot sometimes but, honestly, i didn't wanna draw one, so i knew the wings were gonna be her thing
with a few more passes that, for now, are lost to time, i was going in a certain direction regarding them
i started playing with the idea of making her hair not only be clouds but also her very wings, enveloping her in a way that she would be peeking out like the very first rays of sunshine (cause, y'know, she's dawn)
i thought i was being clever with the hair-wings, turns out, nyx does that too, lol
either way, here's one screenshot i have saved of what i ended up with after that (feat. Selene, who i was referencing for family resemblance):
this pass includes many things that i very much liked, and some that not so much
(you may notice this one does not include the rosy fingers, don't worry, those would've been included had i kept it. at this point, too, i still only planned to make the rosy fingers very literal and mostly just a gradient on her hands. you'll see how that changes later)
i really really like the inclusion of the star motifs in this version, specially the one on her forehead representing the morning star! i also think this one captures the game's style much more than any other (even the final one)
i love her playful expression, her appearance overall and the whole "peeking behind her own hair, like curtains" thing i find very fun
what i did not end up liking were the golds and jewelery (it was all bullshit. just... random) and the inclusion (like the first pass i showed) of The Sun™, which i ultimately decided should be reserved for Helios considering HE truly is The Sun™. from... the sky.
i wanted her to be her own thing, wanted to express the effect of dawn without relying on someone's else's thing (that being, the sun. which she is not) so i changed directions, scrapped the whole thing, and started again
and, at this point, you might think "why scrap the whole thing? you could just edit that into what you had"
yes, i could. but i had been at this for too long and kept spiraling into the whole "it's not good enough" train of thought so i decided i hated it and started over
you know these!
if you've seen the post, that is, maybe you've stumbled here just now. i don't know
anyway. so, then, i finally reached her final iteration
i changed my mind about the cloud-wings-curtain hair and made her wings, instead, be made of sunlight
i included cicadas, which are associated with the goddess
i also wanted to make the rosy fingers into something more creative, so i had the idea of coating her hands in gold that, when hit by light, make the tips of her finger look rose-colored. with that, too, i referenced some descriptions of her that, instead of the rosy fingers, would describe her as having golden arms
the flowing ribbons i wanted to enhance the imagery of the falling rays of sunshine
i gave her a tiara, which she is also sometimes described to have
with the gold and jewelery, too, i wanted them to lead you eyes down
and i gave her the golden halo and the two... balls cause Selene has that too and they're sisters. or something.
so, i got to this point and guess what? i hated it.
the style, for me, didn't match the game at all like i wanted. some parts felt too plain and that gold bullshit in the middle of her dress, honestly, i still hate. it makes no sense.
but, like i said, i had been at it for too long to the point it was almost making me sick so i decided to call it done and posted it anyway.
thankfully, i got very good reactions from it! loved readings the tags of that post and seeing what everyone thought, seeing y'all catching the references. it made me hate it a little bit less and, to this day, i don't hate it as much as i did then
but i still wanted to do her justice
so, yesterday i wanted to finally get started on Helios like i said i would, but found myself thinking back on her and i wanted the whole family to look good and coherent when put together!
i came up with this:
i kept the sunlight wings, that i very much like
i scrapped the halo and the balls, too. i thought it was too lazy of a way to make the family resemblance show through and i didn't want the siblings to be too matchy-matchy. none of the designs in the game really do that
i decided to scrap the gold. now with Helios in mind i wanted each sibling to have their own signature metal. Selene has silver, i wanted to save the gold for Helios so, for Eos, i went with whatever you can call the purple-ish metal on her aspect. with a few details using the pink-ish one, like with the metal rosy fingers, which i also like a lot and kept
yeah, the golden arm thing was scrapped, but i think it was a valid sacrifice
i also added strands of hair falling over her face like sunlight! bringing back a little bit of that curtain feeling and the whole peeking behind it thing i mentioned before
i tried to be more clear with the jewelery, had them look like clouds, some moons, the dangling thing looks like the sun and it's rays, still kept the whole idea of having them make your eyes trail down (as i did with the design in it's entirety) and worked a little bit more on her tiara, too. honeslty, the old one was straight up bullshit. i added it, like, as a last thing
i also made it more clear that the cicadas are supposed to be made of light by having them come out of the bright spots in her design (and actually looked up references of the real insect instead of just bullshitting it, like last time. lots of bullshit happened last time)
and here we are! eos_final_final for real this time!
you can see i also brought back quite a bit from one of the ealy passes because, like i said, i really liked her appearance in that one! i hated it back then but, after stepping back from it for so long, i can see that it was pretty good
all in all, though i know there's always room for improvement, i'm pretty satisfied with what i have right now!
if you've read it this far, lemme know what you think! or don't!! it's up to you!!!
Comic for @witchflameweek , I have this silly headcanon that the Crossroads are a blind spot in Prometheus' foresight so when he goes there he’s just kind of a regular guy.
"You know … let me get back to you on that. I need a little time to think it through." yeah i thought about the 3rd ambrosia dialogue. and i think zagreus is insane, and meg is equally insane about it off screen.
I was streaming Hades II on discord with my friends once and one of them saw Chronos and asked me if he was black,and I sad not really. I then had a interaction with him after defeating Hecate before Oceanus and my friend proceeded to agree that yes,Chronos is not black,and that the skin tone lied to him.
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