First of my Cupid and Psyche illustrations! This illustrates the scene in which Cupid (who has been sent by Venus to punish Psyche for everyone thinking she’s prettier than the goddess of love herself) first sees Psyche, and accidentally pricks himself with his own arrow. He falls deeply in love with her (And really, he already was thinking she was rather pretty anyway) and decides to disobey his mother, removing any enchantment he had put on her.

I did a lot of research for this, I hope it shows! Instead of Greek art I’m branching out to the next peninsula over and emulating Roman wall painting, since this is really more of a Roman story than Greek. It’s as if a wall painting from Pompeii or something has been found and restored, with pieces chipped off and missing which just happen to highlight key details. His barely-there bit of cloth is rather dramatically ballooning behind him, but I assure you it’s completely realistic for ancient roman art! They used very over-dramatically billowing fabric to indicate movement on their often very stiff figures.

The paper I used for Cupid’s wings was really flimsy, and it actually fluttered slightly whenever I worked on Cupid. Very distracting but really cute! I’m almost disappointed I had to glue them down so they’d stick to the crack they were on…