| Pic Description: |
Nigella was once invited to an old gothic estate in the countryside to present a scientific paper at a conference for the Society of Liminal Explorers. The obscure club is devoted to the study of revenants, preferably through direct personal experience and interaction.
As part of the conference, everyone was required to keep a zombie in their bedroom at night. The undead abomination in Nigella''s room stood at the edge of her bed and seemed to stare intensely at her as she slept, but (apart from its foul stench) never bothered her beyond that. Perhaps it couldn''t see her-- many people who have never encountered a zombie don''t realize most of the creatures are actually blind; unless a corpse is made into a zombie immediately after death, the eyeballs quickly rot away to uselessness. Or perhaps the heat from the nearby fireplace kept the zombie from clearly perceiving her position in the room. Or perhaps she stayed safe because of those strange incantations from ''Cultes des Goules'' she sang before slipping into bed. Who can really say in such weird matters? These are among the kinds of issues the Liminal Society hopes to investigate.
P4NW and P4NM, both bearing my own textures, rendered in Poser 4. Known prop credits: Long Hair Evolution by Kozaburo, Victorian Lamp by Mark Alan Willett, Book of Darkness by chk2033, and Magic Sheet by Traveler. The other props, all ancient freebies from Poser 4 days, lack readmes and thus cannot be identified for proper attribution.
I''m not big on postwork these days, usually preferring just to keep and use the raw output renders, but I couldn''t quite get the lighting hue I wanted in Poser 4 without washing out the textures, so I adjusted it afterward (a simple enough task). Also, the round table has really crummy UV coordinates, but I didn''t notice until I''d placed all the other props on top of it; I didn''t feel fiddling with it by that point, so hopefully no one will notice it much.
Images of this sort, with some monster lurking over a sleeping person, are fairly common (example: Henry Fuseli''s famous 1781 painting ''The Nightmare''). Yet most of the classical examples seem to use the technique of an establishing shot from a distance, apparently hoping for intellectual horror or curiosity rather than soliciting viewer involvement in the narrative. Sure, I did that kind of staid render as well from this scene, but the angle depicted in the the image seen here is much more dramatic and action-oriented. I preferred it by far over the usual side profile/long shot, even though that meant a lot of the other little props I spent time putting into the scene have ended up not being shown. This is common in Poser work-- what matters is the final render rather than the original imagined vision of the scene. |
