Crystal Hammer

⏱️Overview

This is the painting I did in 2003, on my room’s wall (the one behind my monitor). It was empty and really boring, and so it became an original and fitting background.

I called it “The Eye of the Pharaoh”. It is a magical Gem (in middle) surrounded by 4 powers, emitting outside. From top left these are: Fire (yellow), Laser (lime), Lightning (white) and Neon (cyan). The eye itself is emerging from a cloud and has an extra lightning ring around it.

💡Idea

It was an inspiration for a game I wanted to create once (and most likely won’t). A top down ARPG shooter which would have weapons with those powers and this could be the energy source. But since I was also creating music at the time I used the title also for my group name.

🔍Details

I think it took about 1 week to make. It was actually quite an exercise for me, to move around and paint. It has at least 5 layers. I used various 1 liter house paints, only few colors I think (thus orange in fire is not saturated).

• The background and most was done with a medium 1cm wide brush, nothing special.
• The shiny skyblue ribbons in background are done with a spray paint. Also center gem (eye) has some of it. Red ribbons are regular paint.
• The black rods are also done with a spray, shiny black. That’s why they are very dark and lower part shines from camera’s flash. The picture was only edited near borders. It’s also difficult to shoot straight at it, so it’s a little skewed, viewed from below.
• The tiny detailed parts in ornaments (on rod ends) and a lot in lighting were done with few pieces of bent metal, sunk in paint and touched on wall to get a sharp and thin line.
• Outer parts (web) and glowing glyphs were done with paint mixed with water, so they became transparent. I also darkened this way the ornaments later, with black paint and water, were too bright before.

I think I used a small paintbrush for the rod shining and arc blocks (near center) but the detail was limited by the wall’s texture, It is quite coarse.

➡️Note

Well it is still here, even after 20 years. It surely was a nice thing to look at, instead of a boring wall 😁.