I've started on a little adventure on which my goal is to create artwork inspired by Richard Wagner's opera "The Ring of the Nibelung". I've been quite fascinated by the story and the music lately and it's a pity that - at least in illustration - there aren't any modern interpretations of the world and characters. My first artwork in what hopefully grows into a series is a depiction of Alberich, the lord of the Nibelung folk. He stole the Rhinegold and cursed love itself to forge the mighty ring. He uses the power of the ring to force his subjects to dig for gold and pile up a treasure for him. Concerning the technique, this artwork is created 100% in Blender. All post-processing was achieved by using Blender's internal compositor and I only used methods that worked in real-time compositing in the viewport so that I could always see the results of my edits. This is the first complete artwork that I created that way.