The House of Atreus bears a curse. One steeped in blood and nourished by decades of violence.
Klytemnestra knew this when she married Agamemnon, but being a princess in Sparta doesn't leave you with much choice, though she longs for it. The Fates s...
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Orestes pursued by the Furies (1862) by William Bouguereau
And finally, we have Orestes as he's being tormented by the Furies after killing his mother. We can see the three Furies with snakes in their hair and furious faces pointing at Klytemnestra's dead body with the dagger still sticking out of her chest.
I also spend way too much time playing with AI, in this case, artbreeder.com to create character art. Here's what the three main ladies of this story might kinda look like.
Elektra
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Iphigenia
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Klytemnestra
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Of course, there's also the mandatory Pinterest board, on which I collected inspirational pictures. If you're interested, you can check it out through the link in the comment section. ->
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And finally, here's a look at some of the covers that were made for this story.
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The first one on the left was inspired by some of the cover art seen on published Greek mythology retellings, especially those by Jennifer Saint (namely Ariadne and Elektra).
The one on the right is The Death of Sappho by Miguel Carbonell Selva. Though Sappho has no link whatsoever to the Oresteia, the pose in the painting, the fact that she seems to be moments away from throwing herself into the raging sea below, creates a very fitting mood for the story.
The middle one is the cover I'm currently using and that I decided to stick with. The image used is a painting by British painter Herbert James Draper named The Morning Mists. The fact that there are three female figures on there, serves as a good representation of the three female MCs of the story. The poses we see these three characters in seem to range between... powerlessness, defeat and shame maybe? Is the one in the bottom left corner calling on some higher power? Why is the one on the right hiding her face behind her forearms? Those emotions are all very similar to the feelings Klytemnestra, Iphigenia and Elektra go through in the story. The motif as a whole gives an air of drama and tragedy with the characters seemingly dissolving into mist and shadows - or emerging from them? It represents the theme that is carried through the story and the prompt it's based on: the entangled secret lives of three women. Lastly, the cool blue-ish colour palette creates a moody canvas hinting at the not-so-happy content of the story represented here.
