[ART] Anchoress Alley

 Anchoress Alley

Resources used:

• Palette: my own, several palettes used during graphic conversion to my own palette (Rosy 256, Rosydream, Doom Arcadia, Chasm: The Rift palette)
• Colormap: my own
• Sprites: my own
• Textures: Doom 2, my own, textures made by Rencoret, COMTEX, Juggernaut (Quake 2 addon) textures, Biolage texture pack, Realistic Texture Pack, Anon Old Stuff archive (Truespace 4, NuGraf textures), Texture Town, Poly Haven, Zekhmet resources, System Vices, Firerainbow 2; further details on textures can be found in the CREDITS lump in the resource wad included in download
• Source port; format: Eternity, MBF21 (should run on any MBF21 port)

Wad file:

DOWNLOAD [resource pack - "Has Minna trully become sussy" map file - "Minna has indeed"]

Description: 

2026 has been quite an interesting year for me so far, with both bitter downs and beautiful ups already behind me. I'm happy to say that as of writing, I'm doing quite well! There's a lot of difficult things behind me, but also a lot of beautiful moments, as well as personal and spiritual growth. Artistic growth too! Starting in mid-December I began toying with the idea of making my own palette from scratch. I wanted to make a palette that was distinctly my own, yet also carried a bit of the unusual energy that the palettes used in Quake and Quake 2 have. Early this month, I settled on the palette I used here! Besides the Quake games, another source of inspiration is a Yume Nikki fangame - Collective Unconscious. That's where silly names for the map and resource wad come from - the protagonist of Collective Unconscious is called Minnatsuki. 

Once I had finalized my palette, I began to slowly make and compile various resources for it. This definitely took a while, but the effort was well worth it! As it stands I now have a fully fledged resource pack for my own palette, with almost every texture and flat from Doom 2 having been replaced by custom ones. While it's quite usable as is, I don't consider it finalized, and definitely plan on expanding it further. 
The central idea behind this painting were anchorites. I wanted to include them in a painting in some way, with inspiration behind that coming from reading about Julian of Norwich and her writings. She was an anchoress, and her experiences and writings brought me a great amount of comfort and guidance during a difficult time recently. The ideas I had for this painting were rather vague, so a lot of the fine details were realized during production. For example, having the anchorites bellow the pavement was an idea I got after I had taken the initial canvas screenshot in Eternity. The holes they're in aren't in the map itself, I drew them onto the scene in Aseprite.

The cyclops holding a pair of dolls is inspired by one of my partner's OCs, who is featured in Shade, one of my older paintings bearing their name. The single eye is a feature of some of my partner's other OCs, which I also drew before [Fun at the Fair, Evening Playtime]. I drew them last and I was a bit tired by that point, so instead of trying to draw a realistic body I drew something more abstract and playful. 

All in all I really enjoyed making this, and I'm happy to be finally posting new art again! While making this, I listed to music by a band I'm really fond of, called Van Der Graaf Generator. I definitely recommend listening to their music, with some of my own recommendations being: Lost, House With No Door, Emperor In His War-room and Refugees.

Special thanks to Rencoret for making the custom sky I used here, it did a lot for the atmosphere of this painting!