Devi Dancing

This one took a life of its own. It became Devi dreaming and dancing at the Big Bang, creating universes...

I have created all worlds at my will without being urged by any higher Being, and dwell within them. I permeate the earth and heaven, and all created entities with my greatness and dwell in them as eternal and infinite consciousness.
— Devi Sukta, Rigveda 10.125.8, Translated by June McDaniel

I never worked with an image so big. Eventually I had to reduce the size and change aspect ratio, it was by then 1.5GB (!) I worked with it in three separate images at first: hands, figure and then the composition with the added fractals.

I learned a lot doing this. It was the first time I painted this way, tossing colors in there, blurring and erasing. It was more like sculpting with light and dark than anything else.

A little bit of the process:

I started by a hand. I was obsessed with hands at this stage. Took one of mine as reference and started sketching... A few hours later I had something half decent.

Then I started working on the main figure:

As usually, the final version has nothing to do with my starting point. I start by the lips and do the eyes last. By then I'll have to change most of the face also because the proportions will be weird...

I switched from portrait to landscape when it was almost finished. ❤