"Of course I am."

Some days ago I watched a few too many art shorts on YouTube and I got the sudden idea to make a collage of N's face using stock nature photos, with some details drawn/painted on top. I used a sketch to plan everything out before making liberal use of the layer mask tool to "cut" everything into shape. Afterwards came the details and the shading/color touchups on his face and hair. I was surprised how well I was able to add dimension to a flat image with just the shading alone!

I got the idea afterwards to have a counterpart with Ghetsis's face, using images of pollution or destruction and symbols of death (look closely at his face!). I was inspired by those "are we soulmates/friends in every universe?" animations where the "other universes" depicted show a predatory relationship between one person's counterparts and the other person's, implying that their relationship isn't that great in this universe either. Ghetsis was actually harder to shade, because of the greater color variation in the image I used for his hair and how pale the one I used for his face was (after a lot of blend mode layers to make it less visually busy so I could draw on top).

I'd highly recommend you try this out too - maybe with one of your own characters and a general theme that relates to them! If you've got Adobe Creative Cloud, it's possible to search images by approximate color, which is how I found pictures that fit the colors I wanted. So that part was easier than expected. I kinda wish I could do this with physical materials some day - if I did, I'd use silk flowers to make N's artwork 3D! :D

Hopefully I get my motivation back to do more involved, less experimental pieces soon. It's been hard - this year my self-esteem really took a few hits, so I'm slowly struggling to get my motivation back to tackle anything creative to begin with.

-Thetageist

All images sourced from Adobe Stock.