Anger

When I was in high school, I started doing this thing where I would draw a beastly embodiment of ugly emotions - frustration, misery, rage ... those kinds of things. I only did two or three of them, but it was something I liked because it gave me a chance to really think about some of the symbolism of the details I put into the monsters.

Well, today I did another one. Meet Anger, the nasty, hot little demon that smolders somewhere beneath your other emotions when you've had too little sleep or someone is really giving you a hard time on a rotten day.

So let's talk creature features for a minute: I wanted to give this guy an over all burning kind of look. Cracking lava was the first thing that appealed to me, and I think this came out pretty well. I know I had fun when it got to that point! I also gave him some nasty claws and big obsidian/cinder spikes jutting out of his back, by which I was trying to portray that you wouldn't want to get close to him because it might hurt. The horns and tusks are my representation of power - I don't know about you, but sometimes anger is a bully that is hard to kick out of the picture. I tried to make him look a little more on the ripped side, since sometimes when you're feeling angry, it can give you an illusion of strength. Oh yeah, the tail - three little whips on the end that snap and sting and drive anger on and on. Big nasty.

This image was different for me for one very big reason - no ink lines. I'm accustomed to having some form of lines to color inside of whenever I do drawings, so I'm used to relying on them to tell where my lights and darks fall. I've always held some respect for digital artists who paint things all the time without the use of ink lines and create astounding pictures. I'll have to watch more of them whenever I get the chance to see how they figure out where everything goes. I had to leave the rough sketch lines up while I did most of the details in this so that I could see what went where!