COMMISSION (InkSpecter) - Protector of the Hive

A commission for InkSpecter, a portrait of his OP Mercury, which is heavily Alien inspired, so I tried to keep it that way, went online for some alien references and such, while trying to stay true to the original provided picture of the character, which you can actually see on second screen on the WIP picture or - new thing - WIP gif.

After the last upload, I promised less detail, however I did break that promise here, as this is supposed to be a portrait, more detail is good here, viewer cannot get lost and so on, so I took the risk and it seems to have paid off, but it's really your viewer's opinion, that interests me. I did have to do a little bit of a research when I received a confirmation on that the hair is supposed to be... well, not hairy, as one would expect, but more like shreds of a dragonfly/insect wings... so yeah, I went to googling wings and studying it's structure - I can say I'm a richer man now than I was when I started to paint the piece . Also I tried to change the way I do the eyes, did a little bit of a study there too, as it seemed very appropriate since until now - everytime I got to paint the eyes, it was pure chaos and inprovisation from my side, so... trying to respect more physics there and applying my experimental observations (my eye still hurts from that flashlight) in my opinion did turn into much better looking result. Altough there is always space for improvement.

The piece did take much more time than I expected, altough from like... the half of the overall duration, the detail was improving very slightly and one would almost say that from there on the time wasn't really worth the effort. Anyway, my guess is somewhere around 25 hours total.

Now you guys stay tuned, an environmental picture with Mercury is coming up next.

Painting time: ~25 hours
WIP gif: sta.sh/05new08owbo
WIP picture: sta.sh/0kvos1avwxq