I've gotten 2 people now asking how my last piece, DESTINED, was made. I figured a news post would be the best way of sharing that process, mostly to share screenshots to help illustrate my point.

On a technical level, the effect going on in the artwork is real simple. I'll break it down into 2 parts, provide as much insight as I can. If there's any questions, feel free to ask and I'll do my best to answer.

The Shading Experiment

So DESTINED is very much a continuation of the style experimentation that I first showed off in I am not real, here it is just for reference.

At the core of both artworks is an exploration of shading techniques, in both cases for the purpose of pushing the themes/tones of dysfunction or instability. In I am not real, you can definitely see the scribble technique being used to illustrate all the values (Definition of Value: the lightness or darkness of a color or shade).

You might notice by looking over some of these different shading techniques, such as hatching, contour, stippling, scribbling, etc, a basic concept that you can express the darkest values by tightly packing together markings and the lightest values through negative space (aka white space).

So with that concept in mind, let's look at the first draft of DESTINED:

With DESTINED, I wanted to work with a black background so I had to flip some aspects of the process I developed in I am not real. I already had all the dark values I needed with the black background, so instead of putting down darkness, I needed to put down light. With a white brush, I put more strokes together in the brightest parts and decreased the amount of strokes in darker areas. I also wanted to try out a different iteration of the shading technique, so I tried angling all of the strokes in the same direction to more closely match a hatching technique. Trying this technique gave this really cool texture to play around with.

The great thing about this technique is that it thrives in how messy it is. Forms don't have to be super precise, you can just scribble and you're already heading in a decent direction. It's pretty beginner friendly.

ALSO, I should mention that there were references used for both I am not real and DESTINED. I am not nearly skilled enough to do this shit from imagination, at least not yet.

Ok, next up.

GRIMBO'S HAVE LAYERS

So you might be lookin at the final form of our lil character, and wonder what's givin them that umm.. meaty texture? I don't quite know what to call it.

Well the answer is revealed if we take a closer look. JARVIS CRUSH HIS BAL- I mean. Enhance!

See it yet? No? Aright, enhance! AGAIN!

Do you see it? It's a really simple thing. All I did was copy and paste the first layer, shift it over a pixel and recolor it. It took some finicking around with layer order, colors, and positioning to get the best result but the technique itself is really really simple. Here's some more screenshots for more clarity.

Initial white layer:

2nd white layer (makes the white pop more):

Lighter reds (Looking closely there's 2 colors added in there, I must have merged 2 layers at some point):

Final darker red layer:

This technique of copying, pasting, shifting, and recoloring is a developed evolution of the basic technique of adding text shadow, an easy way to add more dimension to text. Again, really really simple technique to add to your tool kit of shit to play around with.

And there you have it, add in some scratches in the background for ✨AESTHETICS✨, spend 2 months trying to come up with text to put on the piece (yes I did the very on brand thing of taking WAY TOO FUCKING LONG to do the simplest shit, I would try explaining why it took so long but honestly it's both boring and stupid), come up with the text after having a shitshow of a conversation with my mother, and post!

As we close out this post, here's my yearly reminder that I'm not going to kill myself. Please remember that my art may be depressing as shit sometimes but this is how I heal. Something something "art comforts the disturbed", you already know. I got a long journey ahead of me but I'm ready to take it on. Thanks to anyone who has expressed concern for my well-being, I do appreciate it. And thanks to anyone who has supported my art, I don't really envision a "career" resulting from the work I post online but the lil bits and pieces of support is heartwarming. This will always be a hobby of mine no matter the crowd watching, but I appreciate you tagging along either way.

See you around!

-GRIMBO

ps: The morning after I set up the upload for DESTINED, I had another conversation with my mother that was mostly going in the same shitshow ass direction as most of our "serious" conversations. But something really amazing happened that I wouldn't have ever expected happening. I'm not gonna elaborate too much but after the conversation there was a small feeling of release within my soul, a certain weight lifted off my shoulders. Is everything in my mind fixed? Hell no. But a certain trauma got addressed and somewhat treated. What was that trauma? None of your beeswax, maybe I'll tell you in some angsty fuckin song or some shit. Just further evidence to let you know that I'm doing fine and also it's kinda funny that this happens RIGHT after I post this whole message about nothing ever changing. I guess that's the universe telling me I'm wrong eh?