major arcana #2: The High Priestess

( Cut for nudity. )

Duality; gnostic experience; cryptic wisdom. There's something about quantum superposition in here, too.

The figures were done weeks ago; I finally got the background done today. One more Major Arcanum left!

The general treatment of the figures is inspired by the deep-sea critters mutleyjames was doing a few months ago, and the whole image wouldn't exist without a lot of conceptual help from Nick.

Here's a couple tips for doing radial blurs:
1. YMMV, but I find they almost always look a lot better with the worst rendering quality.
2. Don't try to control the center of the blur by dragging around in the radial blur dialogue. It's slow and inaccurate. Instead, draw a rectangle with no stroke and no fill. Start with the cursor where you want the blur's center to be and alt-drag out to center the rectangle on that point; make sure it covers the entire chunk of art you want to be radial blurring. You use a lot more memory this way - up to something like 4x what you would otherwise - but it saves a ton of finicky fiddling, and doesn't intermittently forget where the center is when you reload the file!

Also this needs to get posted on Artspots when they come back, though posting that many pieces in a row is gonna be a pain.

Print available on Artspots.

Also, a big thanks to phormvixen for being something like the third person ever to hit that 'donate' button sometime last night!