Platypus of Truth

This year marks the completion of Houston Grand Opera's staging of the complete Ring Cycle  by Richard Wagner. My wife and I have been able to attend all four operas and have witnessed Wagner's retelling of the creation and destruction of the Nordic World. I haven't seen anything like it. The La Fura Dels Baus  staging HGO used seemed to swirl the Volsungsaga  with The Orestiea , Final Fantasy , Mad Max: Fury Road ,  The Wasteland , The Dry Salvages and The Abolition of Man . It was a heady cocktail that appeared to leave those over forty cold while it made the twenty-somethings I know weep with rapture. So you know where I fit in, I bought the boxed set on DVD. Wagner's work is a paean to the power of Nature and a warning to those who would use power over Nature to gain power over others. It's a timely message for the city of Houston, a place that worships unbridled wealth, revels in the wholesale destruction of the natural world, builds its low-cost of living...

Still playing with my Clip Studio Paint... Here we have test of certain effects and wire modeling. There are dual inspirations here: Ghost in a Shell  and The Hunger Games . So whether this is The Major plummeting to the tune of Inner Universe  or Katniss imagining what it would be like to leap from the top of Training Center is something you get to decide. Of course, it could also be a reference to an Evanescence song. It all depends on what you were up to during the Oughts.

I'm still learning the ropes of Clip Studio Paint, so here's a little of what I've been working on. These are two characters from an unpublished novel ( The King of the Summer Court: The Strange Life of Ronald Fairfax Volume IV) . Each one took more time than I care to admit, but at least it gives you an idea of my learning curve.