The Four Days of Apocalypse - April 9, 2011

The four horsemen of apocalypse are always a fun subject, and I've painted them before on damnations, but this time I wanted to take a bit of a different approach on them. I wanted the to be girls. I've seen lots of art out there of the four horsemen as girls, so it's not all that uncommon. The foil Day of Judgement cards seemed like a perfect canvas for this little project and I started by painting each one a different colour. Famine was first.

Famine: I started by painting the card background greyish-purple. I had googled a black horse that I liked, so I started to paint it into the background. Then I painted in the girl and realized very quickly that I was riding a fine line between "cool" and "little girl and my pony". To try to keep it on the cool side i gave the girl and the horse glowing eyes, and I tried to keep the image as creepy as possible. And the i added in the scale, Famine's trademark. Death was next.

Death: Again I started with the background and I made it purple again. However, to make it stand out from Famine I gave it a bunch of green glow. Again I had a horse image for reference. I wanted to make the horse and the girl partially skeletal, but only in a very subtle way. Part of the girls face is skeletal, but only where her robe is casting a shadow. The horses nose and mouth are partially skeletal as well. I also decided to add a skull in the bottom corner as Death's trade mark.

War: This one I painted reddish-brown. I kind of wish that the horse would have turned out a little more menacing, but I really like the evil grin on the girl's face. I also really like her long red hair. I was thinking of a way to give her a sword, as a symbol of war, but I couldn't quite manage to fit it into the composition. Nevertheless, I think one can easily tell which of the four horsemen this on represents in context to the others.

Conquest: This one is by far the least scary one. But I suppose that's usually the case with conquest - pretty white horse, nice crown, sometimes a bow and arrow. Conquest seems like the tamest of the four. I wanted Conquest's horse to be positioned slightly different than the other three, so I painted it kind of from the front, rather than doing another profile. For the girl I had some reference art. I just changed the eye colour, added a crown and covered up the nipples with some hair.

Overall I really like the ways the set turned out. It was also really fun to paint because I could pretty much do whatever. I think Death and Conquest are my favourite out of the four.