A skull the size of a house lies on its side in a green-grey field, horns still attached, one eye socket wide open and full of shadow. A figure in a red cloak kneels in front of it with their head down. A second figure stands behind them in black armour, hands folded, waiting. There are candles on the ground, a few of them, small enough that you find them on the second look.
Nobody in the picture is surprised by the skull.
That's a piece by David Ribble, who posts as art_from_the_aether and keeps a site called Aetheric Dreams. He's a dark surrealist working out of Dublin, and the run of images is consistent enough that you can describe the vocabulary: fog that eats the horizon, a small robed person, something enormous and dead or nearly dead, one spot of red in an otherwise drained frame.
David Ribble — robed figure and beast in the fog, via Aetheric Dreams (@art_from_the_aether)
When Design You Trust featured the work in March, they quoted his own two descriptions of it: "AI art depicting dark and surreal horrors," and "dark moody landscapes of that moment when the light dies and the darkness begins."
The Subject Goes to the Back of His Mind
Most artists in this lane don't write down their method. Ribble did, in a blog post on his own site about why some good work never travels, and it's the most useful thing on the whole site.
"When I create, I often push the main subject to the background of my mind, focusing instead on the atmosphere, and the hidden elements. What's lurking in the foggy buildings behind the creature? What secrets are hidden just out of sight? If I could expand the scene, what would I find?"
That is a working instruction, and you can see it applied. The giant skull is the loudest object in the frame and it's also the least interesting decision in the picture. The candles are the decision. The distance between the kneeling figure and the standing one is the decision.
He frames the whole thing as a square versus a cube. A flat piece presents one clear idea and stops there, and he thinks that's why plenty of good artists stay small. His own account is where he checks it: "The posts that do poorly are usually bland or, oh, it's more of the same old."
The other half of his method is a temperament. "My ADHD brain thrives on making unexpected connections. I love pulling in seemingly unrelated elements, the strange and the weird, and weaving them into the artwork."
David Ribble — fossil spiral with embers, via Aetheric Dreams (@art_from_the_aether)
The Caption Is Half of It
The images ship with text, and the text isn't a title. Here's a whole Instagram caption from May 2025:
"The Aether can be found anywhere because its everywhere. Hiding in the dark where sharp clean lines degrade into blurred dull and out of focus. If you knew you would be careful as the sun starts its surrender to the dark."
On the site it goes further. Each blog post is a piece of writing attached to a piece of art. The Sin-Eaters post is a straight explainer on borderland folklore from Ireland, England and Wales, where a sin-eater absorbed a dead person's sins so the soul could move on. "Light Bringers" opens with a man called Nostradumas waking from a prophecy and grabbing his ink and quill. "Dystopia in the Rust Belt" is set in wastelands where people ended up owned by their own machines.
The site itself is written in character. The front page welcomes you to "the hallowed halls of forbidden knowledge" and warns you about the stairs. The press page claims the Library of Congress has threatened to take the articles by force.
David Ribble — "Dystopian architecture," via Instagram (@art_from_the_aether)
Photoshop Is the Only Tool He Names
One sentence covers the stack: "I've been working with AI art and Photoshop for a while now."
No model, no version, no workflow post. Design You Trust read the results as sitting between painting, photo-manipulation and AI-assisted imagery, which matches what he says about the pairing without pinning down which generator does the first pass.
Tools he credits himself
Photoshop — named alongside "AI art" in his own blog post. He has never said which generator he uses, so that's the whole verified list.
David Ribble — antlered figure and skeletal figure, via Aetheric Dreams (@art_from_the_aether)
What the Work Is For
The site runs a shop. Posters, t-shirts, stickers, magnets, phone cases, notebooks, all carrying the same drained-green horror. There's a free-downloads section, a subscription tier with higher-resolution files, and a commissions page where a married couple wrote in asking him to blow a few images up big enough to print.
He also moved recently. "Recently moved to Dublin Ireland, and I love the people and culture," his about page says. "So I wanted to find a way to give back and meet the locals." He's been volunteering with I-VOL since.
If the serialised-lore side of this is what grabs you, Ozavry has run ninety-two chapters of a single dark fantasy world in the same two colours, which is the same instinct pointed at a longer story.
The last line of the method post is about keeping it enjoyable, and he undercuts himself in it: "It would be lovely if I could always live up to my own words here. But failing can be useful as long as you learn from it. And I don't know about you, but my muse divorces me when the fun ends and it becomes work."