ENTRY 18: THE ARTIST (Carmina Mora)
"No matter the distance, The Artist and her murder of Dire Crows pose a constant threat to Survivors. Position up to three Crows and unleash them on a lethal trajectory, swarming and injuring anyone caught in their path. Use her Power to shut down key areas, predict and punish Survivor pathing, and gain valuable map-wide information."
LORE SUMMARY: One day, Carmina's baby brother fell to his death while she had been left watching him. She had turned her back for just a moment, and was only a child herself, but their father blamed her, just like he also blamed her for her mother leaving. Carmina had nothing but her love of painting and the crows that always kept her company, until the day she almost leapt to her own death. A vast flock of crows stopped her, narrowly saving her life, and she promptly returned home to express what she'd just experienced in her paintings.
She became a passionate, multi-talented artist, and even a social revolutionary who challenged political corruption, still followed everywhere by her beloved crows. One daym her and her (human) friends were kidnapped by mysterious men in an unmarked van, likely sent by powerful figures she had angered. They cut off her hands and cut out her tongue to punish and silence her, and when she screamed in rage, enough crows arrived to darken the sky. The birds killed her captors, but went on to kill her friends while she could only watch helplessly. A lifetime of guilt consumed her, and so did an encroaching fog.
LORE SUMMARY: One day, Carmina's baby brother fell to his death while she had been left watching him. She had turned her back for just a moment, and was only a child herself, but their father blamed her, just like he also blamed her for her mother leaving. Carmina had nothing but her love of painting and the crows that always kept her company, until the day she almost leapt to her own death. A vast flock of crows stopped her, narrowly saving her life, and she promptly returned home to express what she'd just experienced in her paintings.
She became a passionate, multi-talented artist, and even a social revolutionary who challenged political corruption, still followed everywhere by her beloved crows. One daym her and her (human) friends were kidnapped by mysterious men in an unmarked van, likely sent by powerful figures she had angered. They cut off her hands and cut out her tongue to punish and silence her, and when she screamed in rage, enough crows arrived to darken the sky. The birds killed her captors, but went on to kill her friends while she could only watch helplessly. A lifetime of guilt consumed her, and so did an encroaching fog.
The Artist is another all-original concept, a woman transformed into something new by rage, guilt, and the power of The Entity, which has actually been with her since the beginning; it has its own association with crows, which may serve as its eyes and ears around the world, and already help alert killers to survivor presence in-game.
Her default design is very cool; her black, paintlike blood has formed into new replacement limbs, including both an exaggerated bony-fingered hand and an almost insect-like claw apparently formed around her old palette knife. She wears mostly red, with strung together metal "feathers" draped around her shoulders. Her body and face still generally look human, but she has a slightly elongated neck that's a little more obvious when you see her in motion, which is distinctly not the way a human moves...
BEST SKIN(S):
"THE LESHEN:" this skin is a figure of winding tree roots, bark and moss with a deer skull for a head, so, pretty cool if you want type of Northern Forest Demon aesthetic lacking from other killers.
"WINTRY REVERIE:" a pretty rad winter skin, dressing her in ivory white shingle-like armor, with shards of ice impaled throughout her body and a faceless, jagged ice chunk covering her head!
"PORTENT OF EXTINCTION:" Part of a "biopunk" set, giving Carmina a cool respirator mask in the shape of a plague doctor's beak, mechanical wings and what appear to be live flowers sprouting out of her armaments, all in a radioactive yellow and green palette. Toxic!
"ART MADE FLESH:" a very different offering, this Artist is wearing only an organic looking blackish exoskeleton with multiple pairs of gnarly demonic horns! The blackish armor against her paler flesh is really striking, and does appear to be growing out of her naturally. The graphic unfortunately cuts the top of, but here's a better look:
"IMAGE OF THE FURIES:" I am skipping one admittedly cool skin that's actually a collab with a drag performer, only because I opted to review "original" skins exclusively wherever possible, which is also why I've been leaving out licensed tie-ins like the Junji Ito skins, as awesome as those are! Anyway, our very last skin is my personal favorite of the Artist's, just because it replaces her whole mouth and lower jaw with a dark orifice full of yellow fangs in an almost lamprey-like maw. She really isn't human anymore...but she's not necessarily a crow person, either? She's her own thing!
