Note: Accidental long text below which I don't expect a lot of interest in. It's mostly thoughts about the image and the process of how it came to be.

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Ironic to the title, I can't recall when I first started working on this image, likely at some point in 2018 or earlier. For months and months I kept trying to work on the image but never made much progress, continually disappointing myself and eventually stopping altogether at some point in 2019. All of this was the result of a process that began a couple of years earlier I think, with a hypnotism therapy session that I couldn't process and understand. It made me uncomfortable and angry because I felt it had nothing to do with why I went to the appointment in the first place. At the time I did not accept that the imagery generated itself from within me and nobody else.

It was the first time I tried to recreate the alternate self-image my much younger self had experienced through dreaming. At first I tried to recreate it the way that I vaguely remembered my form feeling like, but imagining it more feral. This was all before I started to allow my conscious mind to make more and more changes to the appearance through other drawings.

Self-image is a complicated and sometimes self-contradicting thing, I think. In normal reality we have little control over what we look and sound like... And I guess when the mind as a whole is allowed to explore these aspects as if they were plastic, in dreams and imagination, the idealised self-image is then a continuous process that can change along with the rest of the psyche through the years. This was what led me to explore Otherkin in the last couple of years (thank you to those who have been open to this), but ultimately I don't quite feel like I can fully relate with the concept despite feeling there are parallels.

My scales were always supposed to be black, but I have never felt able to paint black properly and the present colours I use were a legacy of something else, because purple and gold have been thematic colours for me. I suppose even if now there's much less resemblance on the physical traits, this depiction of the form is still quite important to me because of its incubating aspect, as unfinished as it is.

Zooming in on the head lets you see how much detail I originally wanted to put into this, into the pattern of scales and superficial ridges and so on... Later on I ended up making the form take more traits from serpents (mouth shapes, scale patterns), iguanas & komodos (foldy skin/scales, humane eyes) and crocodiles (ridged backs and generally large, secretly aggressive) and so I don't have a single specific reptile species I think of as inspiration, which is probably part of why it appears inconsistent over many drawings.

Ignoring the reptilian form, the rest of the scene was both inspired by the halls of Athena from STRAFE and is also the inspiration for some story stuff I've written, but not published. The choice of inspiration for the setting was deliberate because I was trying to artifically regrow this part of myself that had appeared naturally many years ago but which I couldn't process through reason alone as an adult.

I think I struggle to post these kinds of thoughts not only because they are extensive, also because through my background and culture I was really taught to try and be selfless and that anything relating to Self really was kind of, sinful... And so this kind of thing feels really self-centred somehow and there's a certain amount of guilt attached to it.

So I partly hope and expect that the result of thoughts like these is that others might share their own stories or experiences, which maybe they don't feel comfortable with doing otherwise because self-exploration is not really a mainstream part of modern day western culture. It's also not a straightforward experience, which for me has involved a lot of outward discussion and sharing of thought, on top of everything else.

Anyway, my major hope is that by posting this, I might someday find the motivation to try and recreate a same or similar composition from scratch.

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