Sunday, July 21, 2024

Smoke and the Shadows in the Cemetery of Lost Souls (John Constantine)

As the sun began its slow descent towards the horizon, casting a warm, blue-tinged glow over the crumbling headstones within the Abney Park Cemetery, John Constantine stood tall, his eyes fixed on the statued gravestone before him. The angel, its features chiseled from marble, held a bow and arrow in its outstretched hand, its gaze seeming to pierce the very soul of the man standing before it.

The air was heavy with the scent of damp earth and decaying leaves, and the distant chirping of crickets provided a mournful accompaniment to the silence. A light foggy mist had begun to rise from the ground, shrouding the gravestones in a veil of mystery. The mist was so fine that it seemed to glow with soft, ethereal light as if the very essence of the dead was rising to greet the living.

As Constantine puffed on his cigarette, the flame casting a brief, golden glow on his weathered face, he noticed that the mist was illuminated by shafts of light that seemed to pierce through the fog like rays from the heavens. The light was so intense that it cast eerie shadows on the ground, making it seem as if the dead themselves were rising to claim the living.

"What's the story, angel?" Constantine muttered to himself, his voice low and gravelly.  As he spoke, the wind picked up, rustling the leaves of the nearby trees and sending a faint whispering through the air. Constantine's eyes never left the angel's face, his mind racing with the possibilities. He knew that in this place, where the veil between the worlds was thin, the whispers of the dead could be heard on the wind. And he had a feeling that this angel was trying to tell him something, something that would change the course of his life forever.

[Workflow: Used Tengr to generate a variation of a source Llovet image featuring John. Then used Google image searches to find all the other components to use as further elements. Composed these pieces of John, re-used cigarette+smoke+glow from one of my other images, refaced the grave marker behind John, added more trees, applied curves + HSL recoloring effects, fog pixel layers, ray lighting layer, bunches of masking work.  All final edits, and source image clean-ups were done within Affinity Photo.]

Image list:
  1. final image of John smoking a cigarette in a graveyard
  2. Gravestone Halloween image i used
  3. Graveyard with trees
  4. green rays that I overlaid with foggy/mist layer
Smoke and the Shadows in the Cemetery of Lost Souls 
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