Fin's Imaginal Realms
In the last few months before I left DeviantArt for good on January 2, 2026, I started posting free wallpapers on Fridays as a gesture of goodwill toward what I thought was a community. That illusion didn’t last long, and I rant about that elsewhere. Still, something unexpectedly good came out of it. When my birth month of November rolled around, I made a single moody November flowerscape, and that turned into an entire week of them. One was free, the rest were for purchase, and then I kept going. November rain became unicorns. November frost became dragons. November snow became phoenixes. I was having genuine fun again, which mattered more than the numbers.
By December, sales had dropped hard and at that point Andy was buying most of the work anyway, so we were basically recycling points back and forth. But the joy of the process stuck. I began doing weekly themes for myself, not for an algorithm, and after we left DeviantArt entirely, I kept going purely for the pleasure of making them, and for Andy and a handful of friends who loved watching these little worlds unfold.
Imaginal Realms are built around a single idea taken seriously. One bespoke fantasy flower, or one specific weather condition or landscape, explored through eight scenes because I like even numbers. Alongside those are twelve animal pieces, each animal blooming that flower painlessly as part of its being, or sometimes blooming a closely related enchanted variant. (There are also bonus animals to account for the fact that a month has more than 24 days.) My style, which I call Elysian Enchanted Realism, lives in that in-between space where things look like they could exist, but clearly don’t. Magic-touched places. Animals that feel real, even when they are mythical, cryptid, or completely ordinary birds and beasts made strange and luminous by enchanted flowers. These realms are not escapism for me so much as a way of paying attention, of imagining a world where beauty and wonder still feel grounded and alive.
Each of these thumbnails will take you on a journey!
By December, sales had dropped hard and at that point Andy was buying most of the work anyway, so we were basically recycling points back and forth. But the joy of the process stuck. I began doing weekly themes for myself, not for an algorithm, and after we left DeviantArt entirely, I kept going purely for the pleasure of making them, and for Andy and a handful of friends who loved watching these little worlds unfold.
Imaginal Realms are built around a single idea taken seriously. One bespoke fantasy flower, or one specific weather condition or landscape, explored through eight scenes because I like even numbers. Alongside those are twelve animal pieces, each animal blooming that flower painlessly as part of its being, or sometimes blooming a closely related enchanted variant. (There are also bonus animals to account for the fact that a month has more than 24 days.) My style, which I call Elysian Enchanted Realism, lives in that in-between space where things look like they could exist, but clearly don’t. Magic-touched places. Animals that feel real, even when they are mythical, cryptid, or completely ordinary birds and beasts made strange and luminous by enchanted flowers. These realms are not escapism for me so much as a way of paying attention, of imagining a world where beauty and wonder still feel grounded and alive.
Each of these thumbnails will take you on a journey!
|
|
