I AM ALIVE!!!

I figured what better to drag me out of my drawing slump than my favorite character of all time, and so I drew my homeboy Mike again. This is a pretty fun idea, inspired by Kris from Deltarune (iykyk), so I wanted to play around with themes of the guilt that haunts poor Mike. I think the symbolism is rather clear in this piece; Michael will always see himself as that same terrible boy who took the life of his own brother.

I drew the mirror first in order to set the perspective of the scene, and then hastily sketched in the figures of Mike and... other Mike. My main philosophy was making quick lines and not getting bogged down in details. I used brushes with different thickness in order to add some variety as well. It took quite a while to get mirror Mike's pose right, but real Mike was pretty simple.

After the sketching was complete, I began coloring with a large, opaque brush. I painted in all the flat colors and erased what was over the lines before beginning work on the shading. For shading, I actually used the same opaque brush and just used a blending tool to smooth it all out. Shading was quite easy, with the light coming from the ceiling. I was originally going to have a painted background, but I thought the void looked cooler and was more striking.

After that, I moved onto filters and final touchups. I utilized a low opacity layer of highly textured brushstrokes to add some life to everything, before using my tried and true filters: burn and posterize. I played around a bit before I settled on something that I liked, and voila. Overall, I'm quite pleased with this piece. It turned out much better than what I thought it would, and is proof that "trust the process" is a good mantra to live by. I'm quite fond of the foxy mask; the two fangs look pretty cool in my opinion. The colors and poses also look pretty cool. Of course, there are things I would fix, like the wonky anatomy in some places, but that's usually the case. All in all, I'm happy with this piece.