The Streg-One

[endersaka]

Another WIP, "The Streg-One".

My friend Emy (Emiliano) and I love a lot to talk and joke, mostly playing with words, multiple meaning of a sentence, pans, or even inventing improbable things. When we are together it is rare that we have a conversation without inserting some subtle linguistic joke (often based also on our personal common experiences) or any kind of funny (for us at least) thing that come to our minds...

"Stregone" is the Italian term for "sorcerer"... Then you can imagine "Obi One", "Streg-One"... Some time after this silly joke I decided to render a visual, and paint a portrait of Emy in the guise of the Streg-One. So, what best opportunity to try with digital painting?

Once again, this work is made with my XP-Pen Artist Pro 16TP Pen Display using Krita.

As usual, I started it some years ago and then set aside, because of my other priorities. I found it on my PC these days and decided to resume working on it. The first image, in fact, is the status it was before I resumed it, and the second, is the current update (which is always interesting to see, I believe).

For those interested in the matter, in the old image, are very visible the strokes of "paint" made with very basic digital brushes. The entire old base of the portrait, included Emy's face, is painted only with the basic brushes (which paint essentially a circle of color, which opacity is influenced by the pressure).

 

[Hermes2020]

I think the ability to pun and other word play types of humour are indicators of intelligence. The author Nabokov, one of my heroes, excelled at multilingual puns that work across three languages (English, French, Russian). The parallel reality world in his novel Ada has no electricity, and things are powered by water, including telephones. At one point the character Marina answers the phone by saying “A l’eau!”, which I thought was a brilliant Nabokovism.

 

[endersaka]

I had to search both for Nabokov and "A l'eau!", since I have not much experience with French and French pronunciation and I don't know the Russian author. I guess the trick is that it sounds like "Hallo" in German, right?

 

[Hermes2020]

I had to search both for Nabokov and "A l'eau!", since I have not much experience with French and French pronunciation and I don't know the Russian author. I guess the trick is that it sounds like "Hallo" in German, right?

Correct, also in English. Nabokov was born in Russia, but left as a young man and lived in Germany and the USA most of his life. I could never understand why he did not win a Nobel Prize, although he was nominated a few times.

 

[endersaka]

Well, despite my C1, I didn't know that "Hallo" (spelled with "a") exists in English. I thought it was a pronunciation thing. Just checked on the Cambridge dictionary online.

 

[Donna T]

Nice! It will be interesting to see the layers you will add.