Category: Digital Art

Student: Tristan M.

I’m not really sure how to start this off, so I’ll keep it brief. This is a paper that I’m supposed to write to describe the process through which I created my picture, which I am calling SporeStalker. (There’s only so any mushroom-themed names I could come up with that sounded suitably creepy.) 

To start with, I used Ibis Paint X as my art program. It has a wide variety of customization features, with hundreds of different brushes, erasers, and tools to take advantage of. 

I started by first creating a background layer, with which I went for a mystical forest kind of feel. I drew in some willow trees, with glowing firefly-like beads in between their leaves. I made sure to include a sense of dimension, and put some trees a lot further back than others. In the spaces between trees, to illustrate the idea of it being a deep and ancient forest, I put shadowy darkness speckled with wispy lights. The idea was to also add a sort of magical feel to the place. I also included a large rock, and a tree closer to the foreground as well. Later on, I also added many multicolored glowing mushrooms growing throughout the visible area.

On the second layer, I drew the creature itself-which I have dubbed the SporeStalker. It, as you can see, is based on a mushroom-specifically of the shiitake variety. I took some liberties with its realism though, as is clear. Most notably perhaps, I gave it arms and many, many legs. Its legs were meant to resemble the hyphae and mycelium of real-life mushrooms but also serve as a spider-like set of appendages for land travel. They are covered in dirt, reflecting how this creature rests and “eats”. Its arms, which spread out at the end and are also covered in dirt, are another notable deviation from what one might expect from a typical fungus. I gave him two large yellow eyes, with no pupils. This was intended to enhance the creepy and sort of mystical feel of the piece. Originally he had a scarecrow-like mouth, but I ultimately decided against it. He also has moss and grass growing on the bottom of his cap and his arms. Small fungal growths are emerging on his head as well, in the colors of orange and purple. 

The third layer was mostly just the spores from the mushrooms filling the air. They ended up becoming large, glowy orbs drifting through the air. They come in all the colors of mushrooms I previously provided. I made sure to keep them around the sides of the piece, so as to not obscure the more important details of the picture, such as the main attraction-the SporeStalker. Other than that, there’s not much going on in the third layer. 

The fourth layer ended up being very dynamic. The first thing I did with it was, after adjusting my shade of blue and the transparency of my brush, to fill the entire layer with a bluish ghostly pallor. Then I began erasing holes in the blue layer to give the sense that some parts of the drawing were glowing. Namely, the eyes, shrooms, and spores. It doesn’t sound like a whole lot, but I think it really adds to the piece. `

Ultimately, SporeStalker is quite simplistic. Nothing special, nothing complex. But it was a valuable experience to have. I’m glad I did it!