this was for an assignment on beauty & repulsion the lady on the left is based on a jungle queen butterfly, the skeleton lady on the right is based on the death’s head hawkmoth. I originally had painted this in watercolor and then ended up getting really mad at it. Thankfully, having somehow anticipated that I was going to ruin it, I had scanned in the pencil lines, so I colored it again digitally (using my own textures/brushes) with a lot more success.
When I first saw this on tumblr it was mixed in with your His Dark Materials stuff, and I wondered if it was the Lady Salmakia and the Chevalier Tialys and some kind of sad pondering on the abrupt ends of gallivespian lives. Even though that doesn't appear to be the case this is still incredibly cool, the designs of the "clothes" in particular is just ugh wow