The Craft

To anyone that knows me, it should come as no surprise that I created a piece dedicated to the movie 'The Craft', a story of three misfit teens ('Nancy', 'Bonnie', and 'Rochelle'), at a Catholic school who form a coven with a newcomer ('Sarah'), and began to irresponsibly mettle with forces beyond their understanding.  I won't bore you with too many details, but I was (or maybe still am), obsessed with the film.  It  started back when the film was released (1996), and I won tickets on a local radio station to go see the red carpet premiere at the world famous 'Gruaman's Chinese Theatre' in Hollywood, California.  The film really resonated with me, and it was only matter of time before I designed something honoring the film.
 

I started designing this piece back during Wondercon 2017, and I continued to play with the design a bit until I finally had a layout I was happy with.  I then went into "research mode", which is honestly just an excuse for me to use the internet, and watch the film for like the millionth time.  I got some reference shots, and then began to tighten up the layout.  I knew I wanted to do a profile shot of both 'Nancy' (as played by Fairuza Balk), and 'Sarah' (Robin Tunney), framed by their respective elements/creatures (serpents for 'Nancy', and birds for 'Sarah'), used during the 'Invoking of the Spirit'.  Seeing as both characters are complete opposites of the spectrum it was necessary to find something that would 'divide' them, so I used the design of the anthame that was present in the film to separate the two images.  Like any coven, the image wouldn't have been complete without cameo's from both 'Bonnie' (Neve Campbell), and 'Rochelle' (Rachel True), accompanied by their elemental manifestations from the film as well.  I designed the other two members of the circle as silhouettes, and contrasted them over a spiral of butterflies, and fish accordingly.  The goal here was to create a transition from the portraits above to the remaining portions of the illustration.  To complete the illustration, I added a pentacle (not to be confused with a pentagram), along with many of the items seen in the film that were used for some of the coven's rituals and castings.  Supporting the bottom of the image, I placed the book 'Nancy' buys from the Occult Bookstore (complete with the storming clouds illustration) for 'Invoking the Spirit'.  I decided to keep the color palette for this design a varying degree of blacks, whites, and grays, (similar to the 'Supernatural' piece I did previously), with  the only exception being the two main protagonists ('Nancy' & 'Sarah') eye colors.

The image is completely digital, with a lot of the design work done in Illustrator, editing/manipulation done in Photoshop, and any painting or detail work done in Painter.
The piece is also available as a print on my Etsy store.