Personal Work: The Moon Knight

Moon Knights believe that originally night was a time of peace and healing. Their mission is to reclaim it from those who use darkness to cause fear instead of rest. Neither black masks nor silent footsteps can sneak past a Moon Knight's watch. He patrols cities and guards innocent sleepers. But a Moon Knight is given the gift - or curse - of wakefulness. He will not close his eyes until the day of his death, when he will go to rest in our Mother's arms: his reward for a lifetime of ceaseless sacrifice.

Ok ok I realize my blog has been really knight-heavy the past few weeks. This is the last one for a while, I promise.

I was really happy with how my Sun Knight illustration turned out. After I finished it, I was itching to make a companion piece, even though the deadline to submit to 1001 Knights had already passed, and this illustration would not be included in the book.

My goal for this piece was to have it be opposite from the Sun Knight in a lot of ways, and yet have the two paintings complement each other in composition and color scheme.

As for the color scheme, I didn't want to set it completely at night. Instead - again taking a lot of inspiration from Chris Rahn - I set it at twilight, when the sky is just beginning to be dark enough to see the moon in the sky. That also gave me an excuse to use lots of purple - my favorite color, and a nice way to tie the color schemes of the two paintings together.

I played around a lot with the Moon Goddess' pose. While the Sun God's pose is strong and open, like the daytime, I wanted the Moon Goddess's pose to be a little more closed and enigmatic. I took some photo references to help myself get the hands right.

I really, really love painting flowy, translucent fabric. Someone please give me an excuse to draw more of it!

The design of the Moon Knight's armor echoes the design of the Moon Goddess, with lots of curving lines and circles. I tried to stay away from drawing a moon on his armor, because it seemed too easy, too obvious, you know?

But then, for the flower blooming at the knight's feet, I chose a species called...Moonflower. Wow Kelley, that's some really deep symbolism there. Way to go for the non-obvious choice. How long did that research take you - four, maybe five seconds?

Shut up! Gosh you're so mean.

Here's a process GIF, because I know you guys like those:

I want to offer these as some sort of print set. I like the way they look together. Any ideas?