Zuira

Zuira put on the black ring and wished for snow. Despite walking in it now long enough for her fingers to become numb with the cold, she still hasn't quite managed to convince herself it wasn't just a coincidence. Which meant she would need confirmation. She would need to make another wish.

Zuira CC66CC

Zuira CC66CC (LVL00@)

Zuira CC66CC (LVL00@)

Zuira CC66CC (LVL1˜@)

Zuira CC66CC (LVL1˜@)

Zuira CC66CC (LVL2˜@)

Zuira CC66CC (LVL2˜@)

Zuira CC66CC (LVL3˜@)

Zuira CC66CC (LVL3˜@)

Zuira CC66CC (LVL4˜@)

Zuira CC66CC (LVL4˜@)

About My Process

As mentioned elsewhere, it's been difficult for me, an admittedly self-sabotaging perfectionist, to go back and look at some of these older images and resist updating them with improved techniques and technologies I've learned/incorporated since I originally published them, particularly since there is essentially zero risk of "ruining" the originals in the digital realm. In Zuira's case, I did not resist, and the new, expanded set of revisions above was made a little more than 2 years after the originals below were published to Instagram.

Recently, while outlining my general creation process during conversation, I was asked what the practical application for all of this was. To be honest, I have rarely considered the practicality (of the process or the output) at all. I've just been experimenting and "following my [artistic] nose," as it were. Generating content to post online is largely a bonus/afterthought.

So, yes, I realize that it would be hard to make any substantial argument that the additional details added to the newer versions (of any of these girls) were strictly necessary, but then again, the creation of the original iterations was equally without necessity. I just did it (and occasionally re-did it) because I was swept up in the making of it, which is a feeling I've always enjoyed, and had missed for many years during which I made no visual art whatsoever.

Zuira BB77CC (i001)

Zuira BB77CC (LVL2)

Zuira BB77CC (LVL2)

Zuira BB77CC (LVL3)

Zuira BB77CC (LVL3)

Many girls in many dimensions, one mysterious piece of jewelry…

Katharina, taking sweet, sweet revenge…

Lucia preferred the tranquility of the underwater world to the hectic, more populated surface. She'd worked with the Ocean Reef Group, helping to maintain Nemo's Garden, an agricultural experiment off the coast of the Italian Riviera that grew samples of land-based crops in underwater greenhouses called biospheres. But after storms & the pandemic cut off access to the project for months, the team was pared back to a skeleton crew, & she was cut loose. Not long into her hunt for a new job, she was contacted by a company called Reprion & recruited to work on their research submarine, the Thalassa. Eager to get back underwater, she didn't ask as many questions as she probably should have…

Cleo, performing a surprisingly effective creativity ritual in her studio…

Paris, in Paris, albeit in an alternate dimension…

Sonata rarely had cause to visit the main floor of her building, preferring to keep to her own rented office space upstairs. Like her patients, she generally preferred privacy. But her patients had been more distracted than usual lately, reporting a wide variety of confusing phenomena upon entering the building, ever since it had been purchased by the mysterious new owners, and the bank that used to occupy the ground floor became… something else…

Zofya had long ago achieved a level of fame at which everyone knew her last name, but rarely felt a need to use it. She was a singular talent, a fact made all the more evident by the unprecedented scope of her interplanetary concert tour, and her insistence on traveling to perform in the flesh, rather than relying on the industry standard remote holographic projections. Still, by the last leg of her year-long journey around the galaxy, she was as ready as anyone would be to get home to Earth and take a break.

The night before her 18th birthday, Giuliana fell asleep on Earth for the last time. Later, she realized it was far from the first time she'd been abducted. Numerous troubling occurrences—occasionally inexplicable happenings that had punched confounding holes throughout the continuity of her childhood & adolescent memories—suddenly all pieced themselves together into a coherent, canonical whole, for which her current situation, light years removed from Earth, became the only possible, inevitable adulthood.

When Elyria found the black ring, she used it as an escape hatch from her own life, exempting herself from the toils of work & school & embarking on a vacation cruise around the world. She wanted a life worth taking pictures of, like so many others' lives she'd been following online. But after a few months at sea, & stops at more than a dozen tropical destinations, she found herself once again growing just as bored as she'd been at work & at school. She began to feel as if the very palm trees were mocking her, the rolling tides laughing at the flimsiness of her wishes.

Mae, honestly not all that surprised to confirm that giving herself an impromptu tarot reading at the behest of a whispered voice emanating from a black ring would have immediate and particularly harrowing repercussions…

Pherusa doesn't yet own her own guitar, but finds that wherever she goes, she somehow always ends up with one anyway…

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