Mongolian Death Worms

Well here's the stuff I teased in the last post. My friend had done the classic sort of water hydra from greek myth, and me and another friend were helping him out with the composition. Afterwards, I really really wanted to do some form of hydra. So I thought desert was the polar opposite of water, and figured a desert hydra was a neat idea. About halfway through the lineart I felt like making my barbarian figure something atypical as well. I immediately thought of the Mongols. I wasn't exactly sure why, then it hit me about an hour later that there's a myth in the deserts of Mongolia about a "Death Worm" and realized I had hit home with what my Hydra was. Then I found out Syfy Channel had made a Mongolian Death Worm B-movie, and as usual it was terrible. The fact that their worms almost exactly resembled mine was kind of disheartening. However, I plowed through and finished it anyways.

I originally was going to do grey scale and then color that, but it looked too weird with colors. Everything didn't look right, and I decided to leave it greyscale. I pumped up the contrast, and added and vignette to focus more on my Mongolian dude there and called it done.

The whole idea for this piece was basically all the stuff you want when you see something like like an epic barbarian. I have him fighting a monster, he has a girl at his feet, he's on a pile of treasure, and he's summoning lightening to his empower his weapon. At least thats what I felt something epic would be haha.