OLD Snail Contest Art - The Unexpected (Warning, LARGE image)

Natsaih · 06-23-2008, 04:59 PM

This image took perhaps the better part of a month, just from sheer disinterest in it on my part. I fleshed out the main sections, then abandoned it entirely. It contains a number of flaws, and shows different levels of detail, as I FAR prefer detail work to the Larger Picture, but it seems to have come together slowly...Of course, I eventually finished it JUST in time for the contest, and managed to win first place with it.

It does have a bit of a story to go along with it, filled with deep Snail Theology, as one friend put it, and myths and legends...So, I'm sorry to subject you all to the story behind the picture.

" 'Lo, hark, listen to my words and fear, for the time of re-creation draws near. She shall be among us, She who brings the final night and the brightest morning. Lo, we shall be reformed, those unworthy destroyed, re-created in forms She desires...and we shall be helpless to fight it. Hark...heed my words, the end is among us...listen..listen and despair.'

Listening to those words on that fateful day, knowing what I know now, I may have seriously reconsidered the paths my life has trod upon. Worry, fretful panic and useless considerations of escape all frittered away in the final days. The Prophet was right in many ways, it was the final night, and She, the Night and the Day, came upon us, her shell shining like all the cosmos had been confined in it in some odd act that fitted the starlight in a bubble of glass. She changed us, not destroyed, as the Old One had seen. We...the eldest of us present, besides myself, Tiger Lily, Raspberry, Fool's Gold, Twilight and Dusk, we were made Anew. You may ask...what precisely do you mean...Anew? Well, our bodies reformed, our consciousness...shifted...we were something else entirely, saved perhaps by our simple Ethereal nature.

I cannot explain it...I cannot bring myself to say what happened to those unfortunates not of our ilk that witnessed that night, the simple creatures that crawled to the brightness of Her light...but I can speak one thing...

Despite the prophecies, the planning, the simple KNOWING...the weeping and disbelief...She was Unexpected."