My latest tokenized artwork was inspired by a series of factors that culminated to give me the idea of a floating helmet belonging to an Overlord-type character.

The inspirations were:

• The AvaStars launch of series 2

• Bog Witch, a new song by Madame Macabre

Give it a listen while you read 😉

• Saurons helmet from Lord of the Rings

• The helmet of the Overlord character from the video game series of the same name

Seriously... you've gotta love this guy:

These were the ORIGINAL minions !

---

Anyway, let's get to the actual artwork creation process, before I get too distracted, shall we ?

1. Flame Painter 4 Graphic Tablet drawing

I spent some time just randomly playing with flame painter 4, using my graphics tablet and the in-built symmetry options (and brushes... god I love those brushes) to work out a "base" for the artwork:

Blank canvas to start with

Not quite what I'm looking for:

This one is more promising !

Looots of brushes !

2. GIMP, for kaleidoscopic goodness !

After I made the base, I imported it into GIMP to have some fun with it's filters, and to see if there was a better pattern to be found somewhere within the symmetry.

Maybe something up here ?

Now we're talking !

Sadly, as I've come to notice, quite often the preview of a filter will look better than when the filter is actually applied !

Gah... clearly the above is WAY too small, it looks nothing like the preview !

Others might expect filters to show a low quality preview, but I prefer if the preview matches the end result as closely as possible, as it's the feeling the image brings, not it's relative quality level it comes out at, that gives me the basis for my work !

So... I took a screenshot of the preview and imported it back into GIMP 😈

Nothing shall stop me !

Now to see what can be done with it...

Manipulating the 'sides' with a few other filters brought an interesting molten aspect to the colors, but it wasn't quite enough for me.

So, I took once again to my trusty steed the Kaleidoscope Plugin

And lo and behold, something quite interesting can be seen deep in the pattern now !

Let's get closer, and remove a bit of the excess noise to the sides:

The eye was created by making an oval selection, inverting the color, then shrinking the selection, inverting it again (but by another kind of inversion, to keep it interesting), etc.

I also drew some 'horns' by smudging the sides of the helmet out and upwards ^

Then, I used the Anguish filter to darken the colors immensely, giving it the correct vibe for what I was planning :

And started manipulating the colors to make distinct frames:

After than, it was just a question of creating the animation, optimizing it and converting it to 128 colors so it could be made into a proper GIF, and voilà :

---

So... what do you think, Alien Art Hive ?

Is it Alien enough to be in this group ? 👽