The Green One
This piece began as a vision that wouldn’t leave me alone.
I didn’t plan it. I didn’t sketch it out or decide what it was going to be. It arrived messy, loud, and half-formed, and my job was simply to get it out of my head and onto the screen before it disappeared. What I love about this particular artwork is how wild it stayed. I didn’t try to civilise it.
The green came first. Thick, glowing, almost wet-looking green. Not a clean or comforting green, but something damp and fungal, like moss, rot, stagnant water, and earth all mixed together. It has that woodland smell to it — mud, decay, growth happening all at once. The digital paint feels heavy, goopy, dragged around rather than carefully placed. That was deliberate. I wanted it to feel physical, like substance rather than image.
The whole piece feels like alchemy to me. Not in a mystical-symbol way, just the act of mixing and letting things react. Green bleeding into red. Shadow scraped back into light. Layers laid down, torn up, and laid down again. I didn’t want it to look finished. I wanted it to look worked on, disturbed, unstable.
Out of that chaos, she appeared.
She isn’t pretty. She isn’t balanced. Her head is too big, her body out of proportion, her face stretched and strained. There’s suffering in her posture. She looks like she’s carrying something she doesn’t fully understand. I like that. I wanted her to feel wrong — like a mutation rather than a design.
She’s undead, but not in a dramatic horror way. More like something that died and didn’t leave properly. Still conscious enough to feel, but not enough to make sense of what she’s become. There’s a feral quality to her, a survival instinct that’s taken over. She hides. She wanders. She feeds when she has to. She screams when everything overwhelms her. Not out of aggression, but because there’s too much happening inside her at once.
Walking through nature had a lot to do with her emergence. Being in that liminal space where imagination, environment, and inner world overlap. Wet paths, mossed stones, polluted streams, overgrown places where water and earth blur into each other. That essence of the green — the organic, the chaotic, the dangerous side of nature — merged into this being. Not malevolent. Just uncontrolled. Just continuing.
What I find important about her is that she breaks expectations. We don’t often associate the feminine with dirt, smell, rot, or ferality. Even monsters are usually made palatable in some way. She isn’t. She’s uncomfortable. She’s an abomination. A consequence of magic, earth, and growth going too far without restraint.
Before I ever took this image into AI tools and began developing it further, this raw piece was the core of everything. This was the moment she first surfaced. Scruffy. Illuminated. Chaotic. Alive. I didn’t want to lose that when refining her later, because this version carries the original energy — the scream, the glow, the instability.
This artwork reminds me why I make things in the first place.
To catch these strange, feral visions when they appear — and let them exist without forcing them into something tidy.
Sometimes the most honest work is the work that still looks like it might fall apart.