This is my entry to the LMAC let's make a collage competition round 122.
The Inn at the End of the World
This artwork was partly inspired by a short fantasy story that I wrote the first draft of recently, yet I could find no ending for it, and the main character seemed a little flat and purposeless.
It was through the process of creating this art that the inspiration came for the full story of the curse of the warrior Athelstrand, and how he became a gaint guardian at the edge of the world.
To read the full story please visit the short fiction post I will be publishing in The Ink Well community tomorrow and will link in this post as an edit The Curse of Athelstrand – Fantasy Fiction.
I built and founded the ink well two years ago but had to hand it over to new management due to health issues. The community is now run by the most amazing team of writers who keep the spirit of fiction alive on hive.
The Ink Well community doesn't allow cross-posting, but I have been thinking that LMAC and The Ink Well would be perfect for some type of collaboration for a while now, but couldn't figure out how this might work.
Perhaps this duel post I've created with the fiction (with the art that helped inspire it) posted in the ink well, and the artwork with process posted here for LMAC 122 might inspire some ideas.
Creative Digital Art Process
First I cropped out all of the trappings of modernity in the original image posted by @shaka as I had a clear vision of the main house being an old-style Inn, or perhaps a blacksmith or farriers.
Which meant doing some close work using the paths tool in gimp to get a close and perfect crop to a transparent background.
I then hunted for a landscape in the LMAC LIL image gallery that had a magical or otherworldly feel to it, and finally settled on a misty sunrise picture by @sachingeorge.
Before flipping the building image layer and adjusting the contrast and brightness to better fit in with the lighting of the landscape.
I then set about cutting out the crystal elephant to transparent, again using the paths tool to get a clean cut to a transparent background. I did try using fuzzy select to make this quicker but the colours were too similar and it was removing sections of the elephant so I had to do it the hard way 😂
After positioning the elephant in the image I'd built up so far I had a flash of inspiration that feeds into the story I published in The Ink Well to include a giant warrior in the background as a kind of guardian of what lies beyond in the mist.
Again, fuzzy select was no good so I decided to use the eraser tool freehand to cut the warrior out just for a change of pace, but it was a long labour of love, and I was very happy with the final cut.
Finally, I messed around for a while resizing and positioning each layer to get it looking right in regards to distance perspective etc and then added a subtle rain effect using a tutorial I found on this website.
Leaving me with the final image which quickly led me on to write the short story I will be publishing in The Ink Well community tomorrow. Please return tomorrow to find the link below which will be active, leading to the fantasy story, as I don't like to post more than once/day.
The Curse of Athelstrand – Fantasy Fiction
Resources Used:
I used three images from the LMAC Image Library for this collage, and sourced one from pixabay:
 Contributed to the #LIL by @sachingeorge. |  Contributed to the #LIL by @doriangel. |
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Contributed to the #LIL by @anibal-aa.
 |  Image by Gioele Fazzeri from Pixabay |
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I hope you have enjoyed this fantasy collage art.
Thanks for reading.
EDIT: I have now added links in this post to the fantasy fiction short story I wrote partly inspired by the creative process of creating this digital art.
All image sources in this post are CC licence made using GIMP Photo Editing Suit. I have set @lmac as 20% beneficiary of this post's rewards to help support the community and added 2% beneficiary to @sachingeorge, @doriangel & @anibal-aa for using their images.
If you have enjoyed this creative post, please check out my homepage @raj808 for similar content.
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