Power is getting what you want. Others giving it to you, or you taking it by force. Hell, even taking what others are willing to give, just to prove that you can.
Nothing embodies power as profoundly as a space drake like
\n\t\t\t\t\tsl1. A strong, sexy beast that loves to amuse himself playing with lesser beings, having his way with their bodies and minds alike until they snap. Any broken toy not worth fixing can just be thrown away; there are countless others to enjoy. Remoulding them to his liking is trivial, as life and matter harbour no secrets from a being made from the very cosmos themselves.And if he wants to be worshipped, you can be damn sure he's going to be worshipped. That's what power is.
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Some of you might remember a piece I made a long while back inspired by Monster Mind. There was something that its creator, argon_vile, said that's stuck with me for a bit. You spend countless hours on one small project after another, hopefully learning along the way and improving a little bit each time. Every now and then, though, it can be worth it to try something big. Something you're not actually sure you can pull off, and that you don't take any shortcuts on, to see what you're actually capable of. It's a pretty fundamentally different experience, spending a considerably longer amount of time on something than you're used to. You have to know what you want, but odds are that if you've decided that such an undertaking is worth it, you have a clear vision to begin with.
This is one of those big pieces. It's big in most senses of the word. It has the most fully-drawn characters I've ever included in a piece here (even if only three), it has an actual thought-out background (with much more planning than its simplicity would suggest), it took about seventy hours including an initial sketch on paper (but not the hours dedicated to talking about what it would be and thinking about it on my own), its .kra file uses all of my RAM (I don't even know how many hundreds of layers it has), and it comes disconcertingly close to FA's file size limit, at 6.25 MB out of a maximum 10 MB. I've been keeping a list of detailed notes including links to references since I began on the piece. Hell, even this description necessitated an outline, and it's probably one of the biggest (if not the biggest) that I've written on this site. It took the better part of an hour. The flavour text was written long in advance of this description and took some thought, too.
I may have drawn all of these characters before, and it may have inflation and nudity as my work usually does, but I'd hope that it's fairly apparent to anybody familiar with my work that this has something of a different character to it. It's a piece for a specific person, sure, which I don't do terribly often anymore, but it goes far beyond that. Arousal, to be frank, isn't the objective of this one. It's created to be a portrait. The intention is to capture a particular characterization of an individual, devoting the entire space - and even other characters - around them to that end. I had a great amount of discussion with sl1 about not only what everybody involved would be doing, but even minute details such as the style of architecture (which was his choice, and I think it works quite nicely). He also supplied the idea for a marble throne and the circuit board design below. It's the first piece I've made on here, one might say, with an intention of having some degree of intellectual character. I thought about the formal elements of the composition (two kinds simultaneously, in fact), the palette, the perspective, and the lighting (which one might notice behaves very strangely here). Anyone who's familiar with these matters is more than welcome to examine them; I hope they're apparent to those looking for them.
I tried to make everything here draw the viewer's eye to the protagonist, preferably his expression, staring so confidently at the viewer as if to say "all of this is mine." Both characters look at him, of course. One can also draw a cross with the lines from the female's foot to his opposing tendril, or from my foot to the other tendril, and he also serves as the focal point for the (admittedly somewhat de-emphasized) linear perspective. At the same time, he forms the peak of a triangle with its feet sitting where the other characters meet the ground; his size manages to make him the tallest even sitting down next to me on my feet. He also acts as something of a light source, having a faint glow around him and sitting in the centre of the lighting of the frame, which is bordered by shadow. The weird floor lighting on the back wall is something of a justification for the shadows on his own body coming from below; it's very contradictory lighting, but the light on each character was still deliberate.
I hope I've made obvious by now what sort of character this is supposed to depict in him. I spent more time than I could possibly recollect pondering how to portray a character as powerful in a single image. Not in a physical sense, necessarily, but in having the means available to him to take whatever he wants. His wants, as one hopefully notices, are also explicitly sexual in nature; he proudly caresses both members of his harem (having power over both sexes, I'll emphasize) while sitting on his throne, clearly aroused. One member fawns over him, attracted to the allure of a big strong dragon, and the other looks up at him with concern, if not protest. The former shows that others are willing to give what he wants; the latter shows that he's fully willing to take it himself. The lighting from below is meant to accentuate a somewhat threatening feeling; recall the spooky effect of a person shining a flashlight underneath their face.
There are some smaller details, too, of course. One might notice that the Draco constellation is visible through the window. It's also probably quite obvious, but I was also deliberate about having him leak a bit to imply that he had filled up the latex girl sitting next to him shortly before. Some things actually had to be changed from the original plans, as well. I originally envisioned (and actually sketched) a dragon motif on the throne, but I ended up tossing it when I realized that the entire throne was covered up, anyways. The biggest obstacle, somewhat amusingly, was his massive right hand. It was initially envisioned to rest on the head of his toy below him, much the same way that he wraps his left around me, but the sheer size of his hand resulted in it covering her head entirely. That hand, for some reason, took me something like two hours to draw the first time, and I was rather troubled by having to redo it (particularly by the fact that I didn't know how I should redo it), but I settled on having it simply rest on the arm of the throne. It was suggested that I simply make the hand more normally sized to address the issue instead, but I refused on the grounds of wanting to depict the character accurately and admittedly finding the large hands fairly attractive (I was very deliberate in depicting him holding me in one of them).
One would be justified, I think, to question how much point there is in making something so grandiose and thought-out to only show it in this dark corner of the internet. Of course, it being furry porn (furry fetish porn, no less), there's no where else to put it to begin with, so one might question whether it's worth trying to imbue any artistic merit at all in such subjects. I can't say I have an answer myself; I realize that audiences here mostly lack an eye for many of the elements I've incorporated, and much more importantly, they're not interested in such elements to begin with. Anybody browsing my gallery in particular is most likely here, quite rightly, for fetish porn, and arousal doesn't attribute such importance to formal matters like these. All I can really say is that I wanted to make something a bit more artistic, and being a furry porn artist, I expressed it in the form of furry porn. It not being an exceptional piece to begin with, I doubt I'm missing out on much by not giving it to a more "suitable" audience in any case.
One question related to the above does stand out to me in particular, though, and that's whether this is worth the time investment. This took something like five times the normal amount of time for me to produce compared to any normal piece of mine. Will it generate five times the interest or praise? I frankly doubt it; in fact, I expect the opposite. The only evidence to the contrary is that it does in fact involve the inflation that people follow my galleries for, but its role is diminished in favour of a male subject, and male-focused art in my gallery has never fared particularly well. In that sense, this piece might be a bit selfish, being more for my own satisfaction than that of my audience.
I've somehow neglected almost this entire time to comment on how I thought the piece actually turned out. I do like to think that it's a higher calibre than my usual work, maybe not in the posing, but in benefiting from the more deliberate composition and clear vision. The image, I think, is fairly balanced, and the colours complement each other fairly well. Many elements, lighting especially, work together to bring the focus to precisely where it should be (the drake) and are fairly free of distractions. Just about everything has a nice texture to it, particularly the marble architecture and the purple cosmos comprising the protagonist himself. At the risk of sounding a bit conceited, I think he turned out fairly attractive, too, with the large thighs I always enjoy seeing on him, the claws turning out as intended, and the sexual features having the right kind of roundness. I hadn't done some of the effects on him (namely the wispy bits) before, and I tried to improve on those I had already done (namely the star texture), and I think it all worked. I had been a bit concerned about my ability to draw his face the entire time, in part because he's never really been drawn from the front before and also because I tend to have difficulties with faces that aren't flat (though I've overcome that a bit lately). I'm not the best in giving things depth, unfortunately, and I think the illusion of the protrusion of his muzzle is still a little wanted, but it's probably the best that I could've hoped for. My depiction of myself is, on the other hand, strictly "good enough" by my standards. I think the posing's a little stilted and the curves seem about right, I guess. It's also certainly not my first time drawing a goo girl, but my workflow is as incompatible as ever with transparent characters, and I had to do a ton of cleaning up on her by hand instead of incorporating more elegant solutions. Somehow, though, I think it worked, and one hopefully can't tell what modifications I had to make on a pixel by pixel basis.
That's probably the good majority of the thoughts that I've been accumulating for this piece. As one could probably imagine, I had quite a few of them after all these months of working on this. One can probably rest assured for a while now that I won't suddenly disappear for months again while working on something like this; this has given me motivation to spend the next long while working on small pieces again to both keep up morale and keep on improving so that the next big project of mine will be much better than this one. I have no idea what it'll be or when, but for now, I think I can rest easy knowing that I've finished this one.