Sister Location’s private night is one of my favorite moments from the entire franchise. I love the one-on-one confrontation with the amazingly designed antagonist that is Ennard. With that being said, there was one thing that I thought could greatly improve the night.

Lighting!! Lighting is such an important part of this series, and unfortunately, the private night really fell flat in my opinion. Everything is far too bright, and it really lowers the spook factor. My idea was that, since you aren’t supposed to be in that room, the area would enter a sort of alarm state, locking you inside as well as bathing the office and hallways in dim, red emergency lighting. This piece was greatly inspired by that idea, as well as just the horror of Ennard as a character.

The first step was to sketch out the basic anatomy and pose, before taking a large brush and hastily painting in the base colors of the back of the hallway and Ennard himself. Additionally, I painted in a dim overhead light, in order to help create some shadows on Ennard’s figure. Most of this stage was very par for the course; the real fun happens with the filters.

I used hue shifting and other HSL filters to get everything to the shade of red that I wanted. I also posterized, of course, and I got incredibly lucky with the output. The posterize filter simplified Ennard in such a haunting way, hollowing out his eyes and mouth and transforming his cables and wires into something that resembles a skinned human corpse. Couple that with the lifeless head tilt and general uncanny stance, and I think I really did a good job with making a suitably unsettling Ennard.

The final touch was the text, which mimics a computer command terminal. I thought that the three letter abbreviation of Ennard literally being END was just too good of a coincidence to pass up. I also thought the idea of all the user profiles being deleted one by one and then seeing that final command pop up on the terminal was a really fun idea.

It’s not perfect, of course. After all, most of what makes this piece good came from pure dumb luck and the posterize filter. All in all, though, I’m really proud of this piece. I think it’s really uncanny and cool, and I like the ideas a lot.