Apollyon - Concept Art | The Elite Division

Featured here is one of the higher antagonist for the first two parts of my novel, The Elite Division. Apollyon is a fallen angel, an exile who went rogue in God's kingdom and was casted down to Earth. I wanted to capture his story into this new twisted figure that he now walks as, a warped and corrupted abomination. With him present in a post-modern earth setting, I designed him to have an "alien" presence amongst the world of digital screens and futuristic technology within the story. A being that locks onto your eyes and takes away the breath in your lungs when he enters the room as some kind of anomaly that doesn't belong there.
I brainstormed ideas of how he would look, at first I thought of him merging, becoming one with our world as a cybernetic monster. However I felt this was too similar to what previous movies had done before, instead of a evil AI taking a robot body it was an angel. A nice twist, but I wanted to try an explore more of a biblical or eldritch as it fit with more to his character. I then took inspiration from both the script and my experience of working in a metal cutting class. Sometimes when cutting steel, the chips come off as a hot blue color and in the script, Apollyon rises through a sarcophagus contained in a metal container that he melts. I liked the idea of the molten metal forming to his skin, almost like an exoskeleton covering a mysterious Lovecraft horror creature, hiding his true nature. As a fallen angel, all those exiled are marked, in this case I settled on a deep cut over the left eye. I thought of it as representation of how they have become blind to God's glory. To add to the effect, when Apollyon rises and gets his new body, I decided to have the cut still showing, as a mark that can never be hidden as punishment.