An Artist is Bringing Ancient Myths and Legends to Modern Times

Adam Burn is a digital artist with a new take on old characters from myths and legends. Burn found his artistic muse when he started a new project a few years back. Taking the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse as his inspiration, he started redesigning them as fully formed characters along with their corresponding harbingers. Using it as a learning experience, Burn developed his style through new techniques, producing works that garnered lots of attention as he exhibited them at comic conventions in their finished form. Due to the enthusiastic response to his work, Adam Burn now has a budding Patreon that allows patrons to witness how an image comes together from reference to finished product. When you look at the original, Four Horsemen series, it’s easy to see how these redesigns became essential to his brand. In Burn’s Horsemen series, each of the four Horsemen as accompanied by their harbinger. To elucidate his work, I’ll focus on one of the sets, Conquest, as they each follow a similar pattern. With each set we first get the Harbinger, in this case the Harbinger of Conquest. Each of the four Harbingers comes in a supernatural, humanistic, female form. They’re each surrounded by displays of their powers/abilities. Here we have the Harbinger of Conquest holding a sharpened spear. She’s adorned in a form fitting, golden, metallic looking armor while her lower body descends into a cloud of smoke. In all of his pieces, Burn shows off his ability to throw light and shadow into every crevice of his images. The Harbinger of Conquest has a flaring ring of golden light bursting out around her, fading into shimmery golden curls. This ring returns in spades in the image of the Conquest Horsemen who appears floating in mid air with golden rings of light intersecting each other, radiating off of the body and head of the creature. Like all of Burn’s Horsemen, Conquest gives off an aweing sense of power. It has four arms that look at once muscular and decaying. Black cloth tatters impressively sway off of the character giving Burn the chance to show his proficiency with depth of field, blurring the focus of a piece of cloth swaying out at the viewer. The level and skill of detail give the impression that the image itself contains Apocalyptic powers. All of his pieces do. It’s the kind of tease that makes you want to become a Patron. He’ll be working on ancient gods of Egypt, starting with Anubis and I can’t wait to see how it turns out.