The longing (2019)
[Original manuscript]
“The cold desert night had long descended, filling the troughs between the dunes that hugged the base of the high wind-eroded sandstone bluff with flurries of moisture-laden mist. These were called the “tears of the sand” – A’shru Malena – her given name. She had retreated to the lofty S’lati outcrop to meditate with the first moon as her only companion. Deep inside her there is a longing, a tugging from a forgotten past, brought now to remembrance by the rescue of the injured starfarer…”
Technical aspects: The original 1999 “The longing” image was also in a landscape format, and composed as such, to convey the lonely vastness of the dune sea of Wesdraken IV. Seeing as I had decided, in this revisited series, to confine my compositions to a portrait orientation, I had to rethink the original composition and still convey loneliness and deep thoughtful meditation. I did this by filling the upper section with a star-filled sky, and toning the colours down to cold icy blues. The only source of warmth comes from the lamp at Malena’s feet. I returned to the sketches and photographs that I had of my wife to get a realistic pose. (she posed for me for the original artwork of August 1999) Again subconsciously, I discovered that my composition conformed to the “Golden Section”.
I used 3d-Coat to sculpt and texture the rock, which was then imported into DAZ Studio to complete the image. The lamp was modeled in Silo3D, and then retopologized in 3D-Coat, ready for import into DAZ Studio. The dunes were not modeled but rather composited in later, using several images of sand dunes in Morocco and Death Valley that I had collected from PXHere. As before, a Wacom Intuos tablet and Affinity Photo turned the final render into something that looks like oil painting on canvas.