Fairies Wear Boots
Back in 2016, In the days before the AI revolution, book covers and concept art were largely made by human beings, using a unique and specialised skill with the crude tools available in that primitive time.
The process was long and arduous. First they would imagine a scene, visualising a picture entirely inside their mind and holding that image there in clear focus for hours. They would then 'sketch' images onto a substance made from grinding trees flat, using a tool created from clay and graphite roughly squeezed and sandwiched into a carvable wooden tube.
This sketch was then scanned and transformed into a digital image... a process which was considered quite magical and a true technological advancement of the era.
These early humans would then sit in front of boxy imac screens for hours, sometimes even days, scratching away at tiny screenless drawing tablets, layering color flats, agonising over compositional changes, and carefully pushing pixels around in low resolution until finally the image matched at least roughly that initial image they had been holding in their minds all that time.
They would feel a overwhelming sense of achievement and satisfaction from utilising years of hard won skills, followed by a grim nagging discomfort as tiny errors and potential improvement haunted them forever.
In this case i'd been listening to early Black Sabbath a lot, and had time between paid projects.
This painting is now available to license through Behance, for personal or Commercial use, and was made entirely by a human.
Thanks for viewing