Hello everyone, how are you doing? Hope you guys are fine and taking care about yourselves and the ones you love. Today I wanted to write and talk about my experiences in creating some unique compositions. We always want to create something special and unique, even when it comes to an already existing character or piece of art, the key is to try to make it as out own, with a twist and our personal style.
I must admit I love to transform characters into something new, with new expressions, of faces, or anything that could change how the original looks. As you know I love horror stuff, movies, monsters, skulls, creepy-pasta, everything related to spooky and scary is my thing.
I try to focus my work into that most of the time, I love to identify myself with horror and creating some scary characters from scratch or even turning a cute one into a horrific creature like you can see in this picture.
So to create something like this you need to fuse a couple of things in your head, first of all, what do you want to say with your art, it always has a message or something that you want to express, in this case as I said before I wanted to show how a cute kids character like Mickey Mouse could also be a scary death rat. Second of all, you need to plan your idea on how to make you message work as an illustration. I decided to focus on the face and change everything about it, I wanted to look dead, and also kinda trashy, smoking and with ripped clothes, but the face was the main focus to achieve it.
I took the shape of the original cartoon and started to shape is as a skull, the evil laugh and no eyes was part of the plan to make it feel more like a crazy psycho style. Shaping the skull was kinda easy to me since I love to draw skulls, but its always helpful to have some reference images to make some great details.
Here you can see a part of the line process and how it was taking shape, adding details and giving it that style I was talking about. Try to add all the details in this part of the process with black in the same size of the lines to blend it all together. This will be the base of everything, also the proportions must be accurate to make the drawing look more natural, like an original illustration.
Second step after the line work should be some shadows, if you are drawing digital like me always use a new layer so you can add more details or erase some mistakes later, this is really helpful at the end. After having the lines and the shadows done, its time to add colors and lights, I recommend to use an original photo of the character to match the colors perfect, even I ended up changing a bit the color pallet to make it look more trashy, the base should be as closer as the original as it could be.
With lights try to have coherence with the direction, its the key to make it look realistic and then voila, you have an amazing unique piece.
Hope this was helpful to anyone and if you decide to try some of this please let me know, I'd love to see it :)
Thanks for reading. Cheers.
