I've been working on this piece for the last few weeks and I think he finally may be done. I wanted to make a creature that was part of the 'dark' world in this weird fiction I'm still fleshing out- so really this is more of a character study/ concept but I still like it. I originally wanted to paint it with watercolors but more on that later. 

Mid-Inking

Between finishing the linework and scanning this thing I spilled a big drop of coffee right on the paper. I'd originally planned on painting this one but after that incident decided to scan it in as is and see what happened. 

This is the lines removed from the background without any touch-ups

 

I actually did quite a bit of work on this guy once I had it in Photoshop. I was generally happy with how things looked but given the opportunity to get in there and fix things I just couldn't help myself. On the upside I ended up being pretty happy with how the digital and physical lines came together. To tell them apart you'd have to get really very close, so that's good. You might notice that he now has a face. That is definitely a digital addition. 

When I was originally coming up with the idea- the dark djinn was a result of the crystal there taking over a physical body and using it for it's own means. In my mind the crystals are sort of semi-sentient and always working towards some unknown means. In that vein the good or 'light' djinn have harnessed the crystal's power without being entirely taken over by it, or something. Honestly I'm still kind of fleshing all that stuff out. The main thing is when you put the crystals into your physical self, you no longer have agency in your actions, but are powerful as hell. 

Copyright Matthew Smith,  Juxtamotion Design,  www.juxtamotion.com et all