Baatezu (bay-AH-tez-oo) is the name given to the demons and devils that reside in Avernus, which is the first of all the Hells. Avernus is infinite in size and is a wasteland of charred, rubble and ruin-strewn plains constantly burning and sending ashes into the blood-red sunless sky. Nothing grows in Avernus, all the native creatures, such as the demon shown here, constantly search for other beings and the souls of the damned to slay and consume.

not somewhere you would want to visit on your holidays

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In fitting with the concept, I wanted my demon to be ragged, horrific and look really old and used. So, he's missing limbs, and features are distorted. I wanted to make him look like a container for something very evil, something that would be a husk of dried and decayed flesh looking like leather. A mixture of things that looks like a man, but that never was a man. Something twisted and sick. I spent around a week on the concept, trying different things and this is the final result.

The actual constuction of this took around three days. One day on the basic figure, one day on the head alone and the final day on the background and tidying it all up. All the work was achieved in Photoshop with a mixture of Mouse and Tablet. No filters other than blur and emboss where used, a fact that I am really proud of. More importantly, this was created without direct use of stock. I say direct use, because a couple of the ideas that shaped this were majorly influenced by one item of stock: *resurgere's pack Slaughter - I saw this and nearly threw up it was that good. Especially the one with the opened out heart, all those filaments of fat completely changed the direction the mouth was going in. I originally had it full of teeth, but this works MUCH better. Creating the mouth to look like the stock was so much fun, it was very similar in construction to one of my previous pictures 'the huntress' where I painted something similar, so I just built on that. turned out better than I expected. Its a shame this submission isnt bigger in a way as the detail I put in on the image is so much more complex and its all lost having been resized. I might post some closeups in my scraps. The backbone was a bitch to do, I so nearly resorted to just using stock on that, but I *really* wanted this to be 100% me.

The texturing on the back took a while to get right too, I'm very pleased with the results of that. I did around three passes on it, and just kept adding and adding to it and its ended up just right. A mixture of stretched leather and decayed flesh stretched across a bone and metal frame awesomeness.

Can you tell I'm pleased with this? LOL I dont normally rant on in a description half as much as this

EDIT: close up texture details available in my scraps here: [link]