Stalking
“Ashra Malena, maiden warrior and adopted leader of the desert nomads of Wesdraken IV closed in on her quarry, her scent and presence masked by the light sandstorm coming from the Polar sink…”
Technical aspects: With “Desert rescue”, and “The longing” completed and both receiving the prestigious Bryce Select Gallery Award, I felt encouraged to continue my current series featuring the desert warrior maiden.
Recently, I discovered a moth-eaten manuscript written by myself almost 20 years ago, in a forgotten corner of our basement. It features a very similar character that sub-consciously formed the basis of Malena.
My gratitude goes to all the good folk at the Bryce Forum. They were a tremendous help in providing a critical appraisal of this current artwork. I battled with the rippled sand texture and Axe provided a lot of help and assistance in that regard. My thanks to him.
As before, my wife assisted in finalizing the pose. Because the image was supposed to capture a figure in motion, the entire action was videotaped and then individual frames captured to provide the basis for the pose.
The entire image was rendered in Bryce 4.01 using a custom Poser-generated figure. Numerous photos of sand dunes from the Namib desert and the flow of sand in footprints were used to create the tracks on the dune. The dune itself was created with the sPatch modeller and the footprints modeled using Bryce lattices and composites in Corel PhotoPaint 8.
Post-production in Corel PhotoPaint 8 was used to enhance the overall wind-blown sand effect, the footprints and hair of Malena. Digital compositing was also used to give some modelling to the shadow areas.