Suicide season

'If only sorrow could build a staircase, or tears could show the way, we would climb our way to heaven and bring him home again'

the layout and the colour

I chose to try this illustration on another tank top, at the moment I am finding that putting these designs on basic coloured clothing works a lot better than other colours, the green top looks interesting although I find that black and white look much more appropriate.

I personally think that black in this case is the correct choice in design.

white looks a bit to empty where as black gives a space like feel (It being darth vader)

Sleep with one eye open 'For as long as I remember, you sold everything you owned, but now you sold our friendship, your on your fucking own'

Sleep with one eye open is a song about betrayal which made me think about different people and scenarios in which someone had betrayed someone else. I thought about Jesus and Judas which is the most famous betrayal recorder, which is when I decided to do an illustration featuring half of Jesus's face and half of another character.

Most commonly the other character would be a devil like creature, I was originally going to use Judas as the bad man, but with deeper thought I knew I could do something that hadn't be done before, for some random reason thinking about good and bad made me think of the famous quote from star wars to do with hate leading to fear, fear - suffering and suffering the dark side, which then linked in with how Anikan Skywalker was quite a 21st century man who betrayed everyone he knew and led to him becoming a monster known as Darth Vader.

I thought that linking these two faces together would create a really interesting outcome.

I started off by sketching out some hair and facial structure.

The next step was some facial detail, I drew out a beard which is a famous feature which makes you think of Jesus, long hair and a beard.

To clarify it was him I was drawing I drew a halo above his head to show that this is the side of good.

Whilst in an early linear structure I drew out the start of vaders head.

Then created a strong derail in shading to create depth.

After that was done, it was time to add the first coat of colour to both, I did vader first which was simple, I used 3 coats of grey and some white for a glossy shine.

Starting off with Jesus's facial hair was great as it gave inspiration to how far I could take detail with the illustration in colour.

I chose a pale yellow for skin colour, this gave a china doll pale kind of look which in a lot of descriptions is how he looked.

Then I added a simple bit of shading for more depth.

After all the colouring was done I realised I needed something to go over Darth Vaders head, obviously not a halo so as a halo is round and has no sharp edges I drew a zig zag with sharp corners to use as a symbol to describe him.

Type was important, I drew out drop dead first to get an idea of how much room I had to do the type, I thought as I was linking star wars in, I could try type similar to the movies starts with the text floating off in the distance getting bigger then smaller.

I drew a structure and divided 8 columns out and free hand drew out letters in each one to spell out drop dead.

I then filled in the white areas with black and type yellow and red. Yellow to symbolise good and red to symbolise evil.

I thought that something was still missing so I added a background with rays from heaven and hell. I also added some stitching and inner flesh to the centre of Jesus and Vader to create a link to them both rather than a rough painted edge.

I added lots of brush strokes and tone to the type to make it really stand out, and added some colour to the bottom to make a strong shape for the illustration, I switched the red and yellow over at the bottom to make the picture stand out, also everyone good has some evil and everyone bad has some good, we are all human.

as can be seen this is the texture of the type zoomed in.

and this is the bottom piece of the illustration with a diamond bottom like finish.

I felt that some of the detail could not be seen so I zoomed in to the photo for a better look at the illustrations depth.

I chose to keep the eye white as I believe it creates more of a holy character and is a lot more interesting than a vector pupil.

This is the illustration complete and I am very pleased with it and believe it to be my best one so far.