Witnesstheabsurd
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Full Illustration Commission - Mothra
🕑 Added 2023-03-25 20:58:52 +0000 UTC"If the world lives to see another century, please remember what Mothra did for you and the planet you live on"
Finally finished, my own version of Mothra - this specific commission represents the first full scale illus. i've been able to complete like this since the end of the game and it's an enormous relief. I'm hugely proud of this piece specifically and I feel like it represents something of a dam breaking - extremely excited to get to the rest of the queue now that I feel like i'm truly in the swing of things again.
Obviously this piece owes a colossal debt to Noriyoshi Ohrai, as does almost all modern Godzilla media to my mind. Ohrai's summer-fever intense hues and sculptural brushwork cast a long shadow over all my work, but I made a special effort to try and emulate some of that with this Mothra specifically. I wanted to emphasize Mothra's "divine" status, with the composition roughly echoing religious iconography, and the stylized antler-like "crown" of her antennae. I wanted to balance streamlining her - making her seem more genuinely intimidating and even threatening and preserving the essential benevolence and appeal of the classical Mothra. Something I felt that the recent non-Toho "King of the Monsters" missed with their Mothra design was preserving that "cuteness" or the innocent/benign quality present in the original Mothra puppets. Their predatory, almost mantid Mothra is "cool" but lacks that "divine mother" element precisely because it's been streamlined to a lepidopteran fighter jet.
Comments
i share the same critiques about the Mothra design in G:KotM, i thought it leaned much too far into rather generic ideas of what a wing-forward insect monster should look like without really considering what Mothra tends to represent and so it felt neither adequately aligned with the tradition of Mothra designs nor meaningfully different in a way that would count as a clever subversion. the crown antennae here are soooo stunning
Absolute mindblowing beauty here
