Ostogri

Project Description

This is a character I dreamed up quite a while ago named Ostogri. He’s actually more plant than human and he lives in the story “Wilhelm” (one of these years I’ll give that story an actual title, but Wilhelm has served well for nearly 2 decades so I’ll stick with it for now). The deal with him and others like him are that as “saplings” they are very human-like and flexible. They travel around until they find a suitable location by the time they reach a certain age, at which point they slow down, grow a lot more, stiffen, and become giant sentient trees. They’re essentially trying to re-treeify ™ the planet after a major cataclysm.

This was done during the period I was drawing, scanning, and digitally painting work (with that dang mouse). This one was tricky because it was bigger than my scanner, so I had to scan it in two pieces. The original scanned work has a lovely line right through the middle because I wasn’t Photoshop savvy enough to deal with it nicely. Several years later, with much better digital camera technology, I snapped a digital picture of the original in order to attempt a variation of the whole process: photo, print, paint by hand. Here’s that digital photo:

It was graphite and charcoal on Bristol Board, with a sepia-ish midtone wash. I never got around to painting on top of this one.