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In and of itself, nothing terribly exciting, just a portrait. However, there are two things that make this picture different. First, stylistically, it's a real departure for me. Silent Hill demanded a much more realistic style than I normally work in, and I feel that I rose to that challenge more or less adequately. Also, this was done from start to finish with the Watercolor tools. I sketched him in watercolors and then painted right over the sketch, blending the linework into the finished product; I also laid down great big blocks of colors independently of each other (as opposed to my usual practice of layering) and then blurred the edges together. Well, all right, after that I layered like mad to get everything just how I wanted to, but most of the face has only one layer of paint on it. And damn if it doesn't look pretty good. His nose is a little on the small side, perhaps--James has a honker--and Silent Hill reference art has this weird habit of being all dark for some reason, so I ended up having to extrapolate a lot. But damn it, that's James, and he looks like James, and it's a fairly good watercolor, and well, eee. Secondly, you should know that this seemingly innocent picture is evil. No, really. When you look at this picture of poor sad troubled James, what you're not seeing is the watercolor sketch that I painted him on top of. Holy christ. It's James' persona laid bare; it's like James looked into a mirror that hated him. Under that poor sad troubled exterior, there's evil. Literally under that poor sad troubled exterior, there's evil. I just painted over it. Want proof? Want to see what I mean? Here you go: an animated GIF of one transforming into the other. JESUS CREEPY. Also close to 400k, so if you're on dialup, beware, and try not to kill my bandwidth, mmmkay? See, I blame Silent Hill. It's entirely appropriate that that sort of utterly creepy shit should happen on a picture of James. Now I'm torn between being scared of painting him again and really wanting to paint him again. |