5.5 Founder Portrait Art – Criamon

Please post your portrait art ideas for Criamon here!

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What do you want this Founder's portrait art to look like? Please list the physical description, Action & Magic, Clothing, Accessories, and Background that you would like to see for Criamon's portrait.

We can’t wait to see what you dream up!

Here are the links to the founder art threads:

Bjornaer, Bonisagus, Criamon, Ex Miscellanea, Flambeau, Guernicus, Jerbiton, Mercere, Merinita, Tremere, Tytalus, Verditius

A man sits on the ground at the centre of a labyrinth. He is elderly, fairly thin, and simply dressed. His visible skin (including his face) is covered in brand marks that appear to mirror themselves around a central axis. On his forehead is branded an infinity symbol, and there are loop marks on his wrists. He appears to be missing parts of several fingers and toes, again in a symmetrical pattern. None of the damage appears to be fresh - these are old wounds, as healed as they ever will be, and clearly carefully and meticulously inflicted.

The labyrinth has a number of paths that lead from the centre. Close to it they are wild and apparently chaotic, but as you go further away the labyrinth settles into a more neat and orderly pattern. Tracing the lines would eventually reveal that none of the paths eventually escape the labyrinth, however - they just loop round to the centre again. If you look carefully it's possible to make out the symbol of infinity again in the loops.

Through Criamon run (vertically) lines of magical power, concentrated within him and then spreading out above and below. If you look at it one way they could be interpreted as a tree's spreading branches and roots, although it's not close enough for that to be a definite interpretation.

[Not sure if including the Axis Magica at the end there is too much in what is already a fairly busy picture. Also not sure what to make the labyrinth out of - ideally I'd want it representing time or the world in some way.

HoH:MC mentions that Criamon used tattoos are a replacement for the tortuous initiations he'd been through and also mentioned him being branded repeatedly by his teacher and suffering other physical mutilations, so I gave him that in place of tattoos. I tried to make the patterns consistent with what "the Path of the Mirror" would look like, on the assumption that the path of the Criamon Primi is closest to what Criamon himself would have had (especially given the theory that Criamon drew the Axis Magica into his own body and moved it to the Cave of Twisting Shadows).]

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Physical Description:

An elderly man with deep balding white hair, hunched over. Covered in fine and intricate tattoos and scars. Sad.

Action & Magic:

A mind bending scene of Criamon in final twilight and ascending into the magic realm. Should involve abstract art relating the astral bodies such as the moon, sun, planets and stars as Criamon casts his final spell, one attempting to break the Enigma.

Clothing: A white robe.

Accessories:

None.

Background: The house symbol.

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