Fly Gallery

So a few years ago I had a really bad day, and I thought about Neil Gaiman's fantastic commencement speech (if you don't know it, READ IT: [www.uarts.edu/neil-gaiman-keyn… ] You're welcome). In it, he talks about the power of creation and that when something goes wrong, the thing to do is to "Make Good Art." So on this bad day of mine, I sat down and started scribbling. Sketching, adding detail, until this started to emerge. I've left it alone for months at a time and then remembered it and gone back to work on it, and I finally finished it a few weeks ago. Anyway, yay for turning bad things into good inspiration!

Oddly, I started this before I started sketching my architecture studies. The pavement is based off pictures of streets in Florence and the rest is supposed to be an odd mashup of gothic / medieval / industrial dark architexture (darkitexture?)

This is the Fly Gallery, a very important mysterious magical place from my current fantasy novel in progress, Ikeisha. The creature in the middle is a spinwren. There are actually 14 spinwren hidden around the picture. See if you can spot them all

For more of Spinwren and the Fly Gallery, see: jesterbells.deviantart.com/art…

For more on Ikeisha, check out: jesterbells.deviantart.com/gal… and dragonsathenaeum.weebly.com/2/…

Pencil sketch, light touching up in photoshop.