Thoughts Behind: A Blade Unbecoming

I am not much of a traditional painter. The last time I painted on a canvas was casually during a girls' night this past summer. And before that, the last time was during my senior year of high school.

But for some reason a few months ago, I developed this intense urge to paint on canvas. I don't know why. It just came out of no where. The compulsion seized me by the throat and choked and strangled me and consumed my mind like a drug-induced psychosis until I finally crawled up to the Michaels' checkout waving a gift card in one hand and clutching four canvases in the other

So that's how I ended up with a bunch of canvases in my cellar that I had no idea what to do with. Until one particular day, that was. I was thinking about Bloodborne, my all-time favorite video game. And I was musing about the various bosses, specifically the beloved Ludwig the Holy Blade.

In Bloodborne's story, the city of Yharnam is home to scholars that want to transcend humanity and connect with the gods. This leads them to perform all sorts of unethical, vile, and disgusting experiments and pursuits. This eventually results in a beast plague where people start transforming into monsters.

Some residents of Yharnam step up to become beast-hunters and keep the unaffected citizens safe-ish. One of these volunteers is a church leader by the name of Ludwig. But getting up in the faces of these beasts doesn't just put you at risk of being killed by them; you are also very vulnerable to becoming one yourself. This is doubly true for hunters that spend their days hacking and slashing and slaying and disemboweling. They often slip down a slope from noble beast-hunting to ravenous beast-stalking to indiscriminate murder. It is tragically common for hunters to resort to killing things that were one their brothers and sisters-in-arms.

"Ludwig" by Sanakaan

And Ludwig is not exempt from this fate. The man who once swore by his faith to protect his city, who guided others with the glow of his magic Holy Moonlight Sword, is reduced to a feral horse abomination. He has far too many appendages, some of which are malformed and bent. A tumor filled with eyes sprouts from his neck. His mouth hangs permanently open with massive, crooked teeth jutting out. His fur and what is left of his cape are slick with blood and other bodily fluids. The player stumbles upon him in an underground corpse pile. One skinless, barely alive victim pleads for a merciful death as it hears the approach of Ludwig's drunken trot.

The fight with Ludwig is generally agreed by players to be pretty tough. He has a particularly notorious attack where he jumps above the player and our of their view. Unless you are on full health, you are nearly guaranteed to die if he lands on you. He's a boss that has elicited his fair share of cursing and screaming.

But the difficulty is not what makes this fight so memorable. For as tough as he is, he pales in comparison to some of From Software's nastiest offerings. The real star is how his demeanor changes throughout the fight.

Halfway through the fight, the fog of his beasthood clears. Up until this point Ludwig has been using his teeth and claws. Now he draws his sword, and, rather than letting out a guttural screech, speaks to it. He reminisces on how it guided him in his duties. You can really see the pride and fondness bubble up in his chest as he lets out a confident whiney.

His movements become calculated and coordinated. He fights with his sword and moans and grunts like a human. The music transitions from an overbearing and lumbering 4/4 to a gallant and elegant 6/8. I've embedded the song below for anyone's listening pleasure.

For the rest of the battle, you are clearly fighting Ludwig the man, not Ludwig the beast. The game's mechanics even acknowledge this: Beasts are weak to fire and serrated weapons. Ludwig takes extra damage from fire and serration in his first phase but takes neutral damage in his second.

https://youtu.be/ALbVEmzY5S4?si=7KmkIoNuCX6D7TCN

Once you beat him, you get the opportunity to talk to his (somehow still alive) severed head. He asks you if his church hunters are serving Yharnam well. You are given the choice to let him spend his last moments drowning in despair or resting in contentment.

He is, in my and many other players' opinions, the best character and boss in Bloodborne. While players witness numerous characters descend into beasthood, Ludwig is the only character that we see mentally escape from it. It is gut-wrenching to see the noble heart of a hero locked within the disfigured mass of a monster. I decided that I had to depict that delicious tragedy!

But first I had to figure out how I wanted to depict him. As a humane human? A beastly human? A beastly beast? A humane beast? I settled on something in between. I wanted to show him slipping over the (usual) point of no return, in which he knows that what he doing is abhorrent but cannot resist his compulsion to do it anyways. Typically, this point would be right before one turns; any action taken after the transformation would be the thoughtless tirade of a beast. However, I feel like someone as passionate as Ludwig would have the strength of will to retain some mental awareness for a brief while after their transformation.

And so I started sketching! I quickly settled on a particular pose: Ludwig has stabbed his sword into the ground. To help emphasize its sheer might and aura, I opted to depict it from a worm's eye view. Ludwig has his palm at a ninety degree angle facing his weapon, as if he is rejecting it. Meanwhile, he is looking away in shame and covering his eyes with the other hand. He has committed countless attrocities with his noble blade and has realized that he is no longer worthy of wielding it.

Not only that, but he doesn't even believe he deserves to look at it. He can't bear to see his partner whose goodness he has perverted and sullied. And, in keeping with the discomfort of the scene, the fact that he now has eyes growing all over his body means that he can't completely look away from the Holy Moonlight Sword no matter how hard he tries.

At this point I had decided that I wanted to create an underpainting for this piece. However, for as many underdrawings as I have made for my pet portraits, I had never made an underpainting before. I really didn't want to screw this up and so I decided to make a digital version to then use as reference for a physical one.

I spent a while mulling over what hue to use for it. I considered red, since Ludwig is in the throes of losing his humanity and becoming a monster. However, I also considered using blue to emphasize the heartbreaking side of this process. I finally opted to go between them with purple.

As I was making the digital underpainting, I stayed pretty faithful to the sketch's composition. However, I did add one more element. Rather than having stabbed his sword into just the ground, Ludwig has stabbed his sword through someone's chest and pinned them. They're not quite dead yet though; they're still screaming in agony.

Next, I ghesso'd my canvas. And then came what was probably the most frustrating step of the entire piece: transferring the sketch. I opted to project and trace it because I didn't want to freehand it on such a large surface (for drawing) with a bumpy texture.

I decided to buy a projector online. Unfortunately I had no idea what I was shopping for. I assumed that projecting a single image onto a relatively small surface (I feel like 30 x 40 inches is pretty small for a projection?) was not a huge ask. I bought something cheap for like $60.

I thought that I would be able to bring up the image on my laptop, hook up my laptop to the projector, and just display the image from there. But nope! That would would have been too easy. Although the cables did connect to my laptop without issue, the projector was not built to receive image data this way.

Instead, I had to save the image to a USB drive and plug that into the projector. Problem was, I have not used a USB drive in years. Probably not since high school. I didn't even know if I had one on hand. After digging around the house, I finally found one shoved in the back of a drawer and got the image saved and projected.

Up until this point, I had never realized the manic frustration required to get an image to project at a very specific size and angle. I was constantly adjusting the height of the projector with a bunch of boxes, books, and pieces of wood, as well as moving it back and forth. I was also trying to keep the canvas as upright as possible. Then when I started tracing the projection, I had to be careful not to accidentally move or tilt the canvas. That was easier said than done since the canvas was not propped against a wall but rather a stool. The stool was supporting only the center area of the canvas and so any extra pressure over the left or right areas would cause the canvas to move.

Moreover, I couldn't just sit right in front of the canvas to trace since my body would block the projection. What I ultimately had to do was lean from the side and very lightly trace the projection. And even by contorting myself, small bits of the projection would still be blocked and so there were some chunks that I had to freehand. Overall it was a huge pain in the ass. If, in the future, I get into making a lot more paintings this way, I am going to invest in an overhead projector.

At last! The sketch was finally on the canvas! Making the underpainting was a pretty unremarkable process- I just copied the values of the digital version. I did find myself struggling with the acrylic paint's quick drying time- I would paint a few adjacent sections, go to blend them, and find that the paint was already quite dried.

Due to this problem, I switched to a faster and looser approach, painting larger swathes of color at a time and trying to blend during the entire painting process. This worked pretty well. I also did some dry brushing to add small, gentle value changes.

I was already quite proud of Ludwig by the time I finished the underpainting. Like I said, I rarely paint and I had never painted something this huge. And then my pride turned into a creeping dread. What if I ruined it when I was adding colors? I became ever so slightly tempted to just leave the piece as is. But at the same time, my pride grew into a high. And for as apprehensive as I was, I did NOT want to come down from that high! Even if the high would take my ego sailing over a vast abyss.

When you hear the term "underpainting", the vast majority of the time it refers to oil paint. These paints dry very slowly and can be worked and tweaked over a long period of time (days, weeks, or even months). This property makes them excellent choices if you want to start with an underpainting: as you apply colors over an underpainting, the two layers do not remain separate. Instead, they will mix together a bit and the underpainting will create a tonal foundation for the whole piece. If an underpainting is red, then every color you layer over it, whether it be yellow, green, purple, will have some essence of red in it. This might serve to give a painting a romantic, warm, or maybe even an angry feeling.

On the other hand, acrylic paints are not normally well-suited for underpaintings. They dry so quickly that there is absolutely NO way that an acrylic underpainting could function like an oil underpainting. Applying a color coat over the underpainting would just cover it. And hide it. And then the whole underpainting would have gone to waste.

So, if I couldn't make the underpainting and colors mix like oil paints, I had to find some other way to allow the underpainting to show in the color layer. I decided to dilute my colors. This might seem like a "no duh" moment, but it's a bit trickier than that.

Acrylic paint is made of two components: the pigment and the acrylic medium. The pigment is the color while the medium is the physical globs of paint that you dab onto the canvas. Alternatively, think of acrylic paint like Jell-O: Gelatin itself is colorless. There is no naturally green or blue or red Jell-O. They get the color from dyes added to them.

Someone's very first thought for diluting paint is likely to add water. But for acrylics, that doesn't work. Water is not acrylic paint's base form, the acrylic medium is. Adding water to it sort of breaks up the medium. You get these chunks of paint interspersed in thin, runny, slightly colored water.

That's where, well, acrylic medium comes in! You can buy bottles of the stuff. It is the gloopy part of paint, just without the pigment powder. When you add it to colored paint, you are increasing the ratio of clear medium to pigment. This results in more translucent paint that does not run. And this is exactly what I was looking for!

I added color to the blood first. And starting out I was quite happy with it. The red laid over the purple while still allowing it to show through. I got a bit tired of the sheer amount of blood though and chose to add some red to Ludwig's body. I added a light layer over the shadow-facing side of his body and multiple layers over the tumor and his intestines.

I was unsure exactly how much red I wanted to add to his body and switched to working on the sword. To help with the Holy Moonlight Sword's shine, I used Folk Art Color Shift paint. It has some metallic properties but also transitions between different colors depending on the lighting. I thought it would look really cool.

The problem is, however, I forgot how naturally thin it is. "What's the problem?", you might be thinking. "Weren't you just talking about how you needed to thin your paint?" Well yes, I was. But that was normal acrylic paint I was talking about. Metallic acrylic paints are extremely thin. Unless you are painting over white or another very light color, they require you to build up an absurd amount of layers. And even after applying multiple layers, I could still barely see the color. Because the sword is glowing, the colors really need to stand out here. I figured that it would take an ungodly, borderline wasteful amount of paint to make them pop like that and that the Color Shift paint was not going to work out.

I was discouraged by my failure with the sword blade and shifted my focus back to the blood. I wanted to make the blood fresh from Ludwig's victim very distinctive. Rather than using color to elevate it, I thought I would try using texture. I had recently watched videos of someone using modeling paste to greatly extend their paint and leave mounds of it on their canvas.

I wanted to give this concept a spin, but in a less extreme manner. I have never used modeling paste before and didn't want to try too many brand-new mediums in a single painting. Apparently, it can also crack when drying if you are not careful. I didn't want to risk it without a lot of practice on a painting I was feeling really invested in. Rather, I decided to just squeeze paint straight from the tube onto the canvas. And the thick, raised texture did indeed stand out from the rest of the blood!

I was so happy with the way this blood turned out that I became a bit drunk, so to speak. I thought "Hell yeah, this is incredible, let's try it on the sword blade!" What made me think that a technique that made blood look splashy would work for a sword that's supposed to be sleek and smooth? I really don't know. I have zero explanation. It was such a dumb decision and it turned out just as poorly as you would expect.

I was completely unimpressed with the way my gobby sword looked. I tried flattening and blending the colors together and ended up with this very gross layer of paint. Complete disaster. At that point it was late at night and my back hurt and I conceded defeat for the evening.

But things get worse! At this point, I was keeping my painting propped upright. And over the course of the night, all those glorious chunks of blood on the canvas ever so slowly dripped down, flattened out, and dried. When I came down the next evening to work again, I was quite devastated. My ugly sword was still ugly as ever and my one big accomplishment had vanished overnight.

Granted, it was totally my fault. I should have known better than to leave it upright. I had already learned this lesson a few years ago when I tried to let modeling foam harden upright overnight and came down the next morning to see it drooping. But I'm a dumb bitch living in a secret time zone where it's real dumb bitch hours 24/7.

At this point I was getting very frustrated. Ludwig was looking bad (in a bad way) and I wasn't sure if I could salvage this thing. I was almost to the point of wishing that I just stopped at the underpainting.

But the only way to learn is to get in deep shit! Whether you drown or swim out, the act of being up to your neck in metaphorical feces is terrifying enough to hammer something into your skull. I decided that no matter what I did to the painting, it probably couldn't get much worse than it already was. I jumped back into it and laid it flat to prevent any future dripping.

I took a break from the blood and the sword and went back to Ludwig. I had already put some reds on him and so decided to go for some other colors. Bloodborne is a very grimy game with a lot of muddy colors. I didn't want to just throw tons of brown and black onto Ludwig though.

Instead, I decided I was going to use all the colors of the rainbow and combine them in the most unappealing and nauseating way possible. Sort of like when someone throws up after eating a bunch of colorful candy. Their puke is all sorts of colors, but it's not fun anymore. Of course, things stopped being fun mainly because they would have felt horrible and had to lurch themselves over the toilet bowl. But the colors of the candies themselves, when they are partially digested and mixed into the yellows and browns of acid and bile, are sullied. I wanted to adorn Ludwig in that sullied rainbow!

I was dabbing in greens, yellows, blues, oranges, everything was going onto him. And the thinning properties of the acrylic medium allowed them to show through each other. Normal acrylic paint would obscure a base color by the third layer. But my thinned acrylics happily shared the spotlight with each other to combine into a delightfully disgusting vomit soup.

I was really happy with the result. And it really got my spirits back up. I sped through the rest of Ludwig, opting to layer some more reds over his tumor and his intestines. I also detailed the eyes dotting his body. And with renewed motivation, I tackled the sword again.

The second time around I realized that if I wanted a brilliantly glowing sword, thinning my paint would only make my life more difficult. I ditched the acrylic medium for the time being and began laying down undiluted light blue. As I moved inward, I continuously mixed in more and more white until the center was flat white. And the result was pretty decent! It finally gave off the glow that I was aiming for.

I couldn't call it finished though. The Holy Moonlight Sword has an intricate design on the blade. I had no intention of faithfully replicating the design, but I wanted to at least include some components of it. And to help it stand out, I was going to use glitter.

However, I did not want to mess with loose glitter. It would be way too easy to accidentally pour way too much on the canvas. I would also need to paint the design first to have something for the glitter to stick to. Potential issues with this include 1: The paint starting to dry before I finished painting the design and 2. Bits of the paint showing where the design was not 100% covered in glitter.

The second problem would have basically been guaranteed as I did not want to dump huge amounts of glitter onto the canvas. I just wanted thin lines of it, like pencil strokes, which would never completely cover the painted design.

To avoid such a headache, I had purchased glitter paint. The medium itself is completely clear with glitter suspended in it. Since the medium is clear, I wouldn't need to worry about it being visible. And with the glitter already dispersed in the medium for me, I wouldn't have to worry about accidentally spilling it onto the canvas.

I have to say though, the paint was tough to work with! It was very thick, like peanut butter. It took a great deal of effort for me to form it into the particular shapes I wanted. After some time though, I ended up with a simplified, glittery design on the blade.

I realized that, with how brilliantly the sword was glowing, I should probably add more blue to the environment around it. I broke out the acrylic medium again and layered some thin blues over the blackness surrounding the blade. I also added some blue highlights to the right half of Ludwig's body.

At this point, there were only two more things I needed to do: 1. Add particle effects around the sword and 2. Make the blood spray thick again. I wanted the particles to be visible over the blood, so I worked on the blood first.

This time around, rather than squeezing paint straight onto the canvas, I put it on my pallet and picked up globs with a pallet knife. I then carefully laid it onto the canvas. The knife's firm plastic made it possible for me to manipulate the shape, thickness, and direction of blood spurts a lot more than if I was still just squeezing paint onto the canvas straight from the tube. I threw in a lot of spray around the (soon-to-be) corpse's chest and reduced the amount as I moved back toward Ludwig's body.

The mounds of paint reflect light much differently that a thin streak of paint, helping them to stand apart from the rest of the blood. They also rise off the canvas like little mountain ranges. Once they dried, a viewer would be able to physically touch and feel them. I was very happy with how they turned out. I also painted over the blood spraying to the side of his sword. I had been feeling that it made the composition too crowded and so had held off on detailing it until I decided for sure what to do with it. At this point I had realized that it had to go.

Last but not least was the Holy Moonlight Sword's particle effects! I dotted the area around the blade with tiny specks of white and light blue. As tiny as they may be, I think they really helped unify the piece by creating a sort of tenuous bridge between the sword in the foreground and Ludwig receding into the background.

Overall, I am thrilled and pleasantly surprised with how this piece turned out! For having not made a large canvas painting in 10 years, I think it could have turned out much worse. Or perhaps I'm being too hard on myself.

Either way though, I'm happy to have made this tribute to one of my favorite video game bosses and characters. It is now hanging above the bed in the spare bedroom.

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Bloodborne is available to purchase for PS4 and PS5. It carries a rating of M for violence, blood, and gore.

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