Weave the Cosmos + Updates

Hey folks! Got two things for ya. After some time and thought I've decided to reshuffle my site a wee bit, as part of my seemingly never-ending quest to refine my public identity into something true but also digestible and user-friendly. I feel that capturing moments via illustration and sculpture is what I really enjoy best, though I will from time to time breathe a bit of life into things like I did with Hunter. As usual, creatures are still my focus, though now more so than before, as I've pruned and condensed my galleries to better reflect that. The sculpture section is still a work in progress until I get that dragon finished, and I want to implement a different lightbox system for my site and blog than what I have, mostly because this new one allows lightboxing of pretty much any media, and also the old one stopped working on Blogger a long time ago so I've been using Blogger's default one here on the blog since then.

Ok, so enough about that, and onto the next thing I have for today. This is a painting I've had in the works for a while. Some of you may have noticed at some point earlier this year I changed my Twitter/deviantART/whatever else usernames to "Amaruuk." This is where that name came from - a creation deity I had come up with a year ago along with the now-abandoned Starslayer project. Based rather loosely on Microraptor and/or just a vague dromaeosaurid-type form, her name means "Great Mother Bird" in the old tongue. She was born from the first light, which became the sun that she carries on her head, and she created the cosmos and all life within. Her opposite is Vusuuk (whose name means "Dark Crocodile King"), born of the first shadow, who seeks to consume all light and return the universe to darkness.

Here is Amaruuk, weaving the cosmos from threads of light. For now, this is static, but this piece is just one of those that begs to be spiced up with a bit of After Effects magic: