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Aurosoul β The Ocean Blooms
Published: 2017-09-30 19:57:28 +0000 UTC; Views: 2202; Favourites: 234; Downloads: 21
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Description
(song link: x )this is going to be my entry for an orca charity book that is planned to be available by the 2018 Superpod event in Washington. the charity book is being organized by tumblr user derangedhyena-delphinidae
depicted here are Star and her deceased immediate family Polaris (mother) and Dipper (baby brother), of the Southern Resident Killer Whale's J-Pod. the SRKWs are an endangered group of orcas who live off the coast of the Pacific Northwest, in the Salish Sea.Β
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Comments: 27
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hey this piece is so fucking amazing i didn't have a clue how to comment on it for more than a year and i still don't so HERE WE ARE.
this is just so, so breathtakingly beautiful. i think this might be my favourite piece you made, ever. the srkws have such a delicate story surrounding them, and the woes and trials of their extended family can be read in how you paint their faces. they just have this.. look. star's eye looking back withΒ fateful acceptance, her mother's mouth seemingly distorted in a wry sense of worry. it looks so desolate for some reason, hopeless but in the calmest sense imaginable. this might be the end and its okay because we can't do anything else. we're all just floating in space. existing.
i also love how you made the stars in the background. all those colours... makes for a much nicer end result than just white dots in a black sky. how did you make those? lots and lots of stippling or is there some handy shortcut?
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I am in tears from this nice comment, U KILLIN ME. I always like to push for how much expression can be captured in cetacean eyes
also the stars are half an overlay layer of a free-use starfield stock image and half a layer of a custom scatter brushΒ that I lay down in all white first, set to 'lock transparent pixels' (I feel like this was called something else for some reason but that's what the tooltip says in photoshop right now ahaha) and then I use a similar scatter brush (with a denser grouping of dots) with varying colors to get a good distribution of rainbow stars going.Β
on the stars that have the more 'starburst' type effect going for them you can kinda see this with the way it looks like they're full of rainbow confetti, haha
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Wow, this is truly beautiful... what a lovely and sad tribute to them! It's perfect.
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thank you;; it definitely felt a bit sorrowful to paint them this way, especially thinking of the very real and very sad circumstances surrounding them. of course, I still wanted to keep the element of beauty in the piece to make at appealing towards those who might not be aware of their stories.
I think it turned out more or less how I wanted it to :,D (even though now that some time has passed I can see some anatomy mistakes, ahah,,, this just means I'll do even better in future artworks)
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thank you so much! I'm glad to hear I did them justice
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This is absolutely gorgeous, I am stunned! 
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THIS IS SO REALISTIC HOLY SHIT AAAAAAAATHE DTAIL
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SOOOO MANY DETAIL...... ALL ORCAS IS SAME until you zoom in a lot and realize there is like. one Special Freckle or fin notch. I am lucky there were so many quality photos of the ones I chose to draw (though there are still some parts where guesswork was required)
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