Life!

While the adults celebrate the dead, the children are irresistibly drawn towards the explosion of life. This is as it should be in the balance of nature.

This is the first image I have finished in a series called Mistborn, situated sometime during the Bronze Age of Europe. Obviously, not all the details are authentic, but I hope the feeling of the time is conveyed.

In the series, Mistborn, is supposed to be the name of an oak logboat. The story behind (which will unfold, I hope, in future images) was generated by a visit in 2002 to an archaeological site in Greyabbey Bay, Strangford Lough, Northern Ireland. A logboat is preserved there in the intertidal muds. I had a very strange and somewhat frightening experience during the visit as I suddenly had the obsessive impression that we should not be in that place and that the logboat had been witness of some horrible event, probably a murder. Mistborn was born – so to speak – at that very moment.

While the scene building was fairly straightforward, I paid particular attention to the textures, using numerous layered textures throughout the scene. This made the scene one of the most difficult to render as my computer was constantly out of memory during render. It took me about a month, on and off, to render bits and pieces of the scene and compositing them afterwards into the final image. I had intended to render a larger image but in view of the preceding, I abandoned that idea.