I've wanted to make a piece like this for a long time. The imagery of Michael Afton being strung up to evoke crucifixion is something that I've been playing around with in my mind for a while, and frankly, I couldn't be happier with the outcome.

I started this piece by doing a basic sketch of the pose and anatomy. I played around with that for a bit, then I started adding details. This piece was actually rather unique in the sense that I didn't have dedicated layers for sketch and line; I just refined the sketch layer and used it as my final line layer, which I think turned out really well and helped keep my original vision intact. It took me some adjusting to get the proportions finalized, but once I did, I began to do something that I hadn't really done before: hatching. I used my sketch brush to add some shading details via hatching instead of relying on pure color shading to achieve dimensionality. I didn't use a reference for the musculature, but I think the hatching really helped to convey the definition of Mike's build (something I wanted to emphasize). Once I had finished hatching, I was ready to start coloring.

I started by using a solid brush to fill in the base colors, making sure to use relatively washed out, muted colors, as is typical with my art. Once I had gotten my base down, I moved onto the finer details. I used a lower opacity brush to shade, placing my light above the subject. It took me some time to get the eyes in Mike's chest cavity right, but I'm fairly pleased with the result.

Once all that was completed, I moved onto the finishing touches. I used several filters (saturation adjustment, posterize, etc) to help add some pizazz to the piece. I used plain arial font just because I thought it was a cool idea, and after adding a gradient background and a border around the whole piece, I was ready to export.

All in all, this piece took around 3 and a half hours, and I am incredibly pleased with the result. The colors, the anatomy, the shading, it's all some of my best work I've ever put out, and I am very proud of what I created.