Exquisite Corpse Panel 5

In our first regular art project, the collected creatives who use the Blackwing pencil, we bring you the fourth panel by the digital artist, Tim Seelig. Tim exhibits his work on his website. Tim very kindly showed us the detail from his Exquisite Corpse panel in a few days before he revealed the full piece. 

Detail of Tim Seelig's Exquisite Corpse Panel

In both Greek and Roman Mythology, the Harpy was a winged monster, more avian like than Pegasus,  with a human face and it was thought that name meant "snatchers".

The Full Image of Tim Seelig's Exquisite Corpse

When asked for his inspirations and his working on the piece, Tim very kindly wrote the following:

"In term of ideas for my take on the exquisite corpse, I was thrilled to hear from Giuseppe the direction he was going in was taking elements of the previous entries, but he hadn't come up with a Harpy. 

I told him this is what i planned to do (and in fact it's something I'd had in my head from the moment Simon posted his picture). 

Unlike the previous pieces mine started as a small sketch on an A3 pad (drawn with the Blackwing), just to give me an idea of what I was doing in order to compose the Harpy. I then started going through various classical renditions of Harpies via Google and (the) few books I have on Mythology. Most were shown as half women and half bird. But for me, whenever I thought Harpy, I automatically thought of Ray Harryhausen's miniatures from Jason and the Argonauts (bat wings and rough, possibly scaly skin).  I wanted to go down the more traditional route of a bird with a woman's torso and head.  

There were a lot of layers in this before I started merging them in Photoshop. At one point, it was taking up a couple of Gig of RAM. The head, shoulder, and arms used belong to a friend of mine and the latter appendage were used as the feet of the Harpy. The wings took 3-4 hours alone and are a mishmash of ceramic wings from my Mum's garden, crow's wings, raven's wings and painted textures I'd done with acrylics. 

I used a mixture of mouse and Wacom tablet and pen in the composition. The beak and the feathers around the face are taken from a Harpy Eagle, I thought given the name, it was suitably fitting. At some point I may return to this and do a more detailed setting for the backdrop."