Gishath, Sun's Avatar - Full Commission/Thumbnails

One of the larger client pieces in my queue, an enormous and complete redesign of the MTG card "Gishath, Sun's Avatar", usually depicted as a more realistic tyrannosaur/theropod, for the purpose of use as a "proxy" card (Where a player substitutes the original art for cosmetic purposes) by the client.

 I was given near total freedom on the terms of the redesign itself, outside of a request to echo some of the imagery from my depiction of Evangelion 13 , which is itself directly drawn from the film in which it appears. I attached the three thumbnails I proposed for the piece, of which B, the multi-headed variant was chosen for it's resemblance to a vedic deity, which is important culturally to the client. C was easily my furthest departure, and was predicated on the idea of interpreting Gishath as a kind of deific humanoid hybrid figure, with the saurian anatomy becoming the building blocks of a suit of armour. I liked this one so much i've tucked the thumb away for use in future personal work, but I was happy to continue with B.

To differentiate the overall flavour from Eva 13 - to make sure this wasn't *just* a T-rex transplanted into the Rebuild film series, I landed on the conceit of rainbow "flames". I've played a great deal with primary/rainbow colour before in my Eco work, but i've never tried to render it like this before - for me, the key question was how to preserve the visual of something intense and deific, something implicitly threatening (In my Eco work intense colours often signify a kind of chemical or supernatural "toxin" or destroying force) rather than having Gishath drift into the realm of novelty. 

The process of figuring out how to render the rainbow fire wasn't entirely linear, and proved easily to be the most arduous part of the painting. One thing I learned for next time - I think rendering the fire at full scale and then shrinking it to increase the apparent density of the tongues/intricacy of the rendering at a distance produces better results - the fire adorning the hips and the flares flanking either side of the halo underwent this process, while the tail, for instance, was rendered at 100%, and I think it somewhat dented the apparent scale of Gishath.

Overall though, i'm deeply satisfied with the piece, and excited to play more with this new motif!