Ameretat Art

Ameretat, the June Goddess by request, taken from suggestions over on my Patreon. She's one of the six Zoroastrian Amesha Spenta, or Divine beings/Deities Who emanated from the Creator Deity Ahura Mazda; They took part in Creation. Ameretat is the Amesha Spenta of immortality (that is precisely what Her name means, in fact) and long life on the earthly plane. She is also associated with plants, and therefore food in Zoroastrian thought.

The art is digital, to look like cut paper; I painted several large swatches with acrylic paint in some interesting textures, then scanned them in to use as patterns in Photoshop. There are a few reasons I did it that way, both physical and artistic. On the physical side, one) I'm just not that good with an X-acto knife, and two) I do have a little bit of carpal tunnel syndrome, and cutting finicky stuff with an X-acto knife for some reason really annoys it, so I prefer to avoid it. On the artistic side, it's so much easier to tweak colors in Photoshop if needed (in real life you'd just have to start over with a real piece of paper). The different colors are in layers, really quite analogous to the paper layers I'd be using if it were a physical piece, and each have a tiny little drop shadow. I think the illusion is pretty good, though it was definitely a new-to-me sort of technique, and I'm not necessarily real good at keeping things simple.

She's in ancient Persian (Achaemenid) clothing, as that was the main religion of that old Empire; I've shown Her with Persian roses, this really odd-looking type of rose that almost looks like a succulent, to allude both to plants and to food, as roses and rosewater are used quite a lot in Persian cuisine.

I've put Her up on prints here, if you're interested.