CGAN Sept24 - Macguffin - WIPs

Macguffin

Brief: The ark of the covenant, pandora's box, the ring of power, the holy grail, the maltese falcon, just some examples of various "Macguffins". This month you are to create some kind of macguffin (an item of some kind that characters are in search of or are desperate to obtain), and depict it.

Deadline: Midnight on Monday the 30th of September. There will now be no voting and no eventual winner, this is just a creative excercise with a time limit.

This thread is where you post your WIPs (works in progress). Finals should be posted over here:  cgartnexus.com/index.php/forums/current-...guffin-final-entries

Challenge rules and guidelines:
cgartnexus.com/index.php/forums/challenge-rules

Rules in brief:
- All challenge entries must be your own work.
- You should post at least two WIP images that are clearly different from your final entry and each other.
- Your final entry should contain your image (inserted so it shows up full size) and at least two links to your WIP posts on the forum.
- No chatter in the finals thread – if you have questions, post them in the WIP thread or PM an admin.
- Feedback is allowed & encouraged together with the voting and in the WIP thread.
- Deadline is given in UK time (midnight UTC) with a grace period of 5 minutes for getting the post sorted.
- Each member may cast one vote.
- No cheating! Admins may decide to disqualify an entry that does not adhere to the above rules.

A thing has begun...

 



Another special thing may later appear in foreground.
People may appear in background.
 

I've got an idea forming in my head 

Reference image search...

AI image 
AI image 
AI image 
AI image 
AI image 
AI image 
AI image 

I'll count the fingers of any hands that may or may not appear in your image...

Stoopid robots   

Yeah, while looking for reference for the foreground elements I found an AI pic that looked like the background I've already painted.
And it looked better.

It's all very depressing and demoralising.

I haven't had much issue with ai pics when looking for references. And anyway, if they stole artwork to make the ai image, can the ai claim copyright or can anyone use it as a ref anyway they want? (As heavily copied as they want...)

I usually have more of a problem when I want to see genuine historical artefacts and keep getting 3D models which may or may not be modelled after genuine historical artefacts...