#illloved

This is a tour de force, really. It ended up taking me +40 hours over the course of 9 months. But since I knew SOOOO worked for years on the song, it gave me determination to finish it. On top of being one of my favorite songs and bringing me comfort, the art also left me awestruck, so I wanted to honor both in some way. So I felt it was reasonable to spend however long on it until it was finished.

If you've never seen/heard the song I've linked it below. It contains quickly flashing lights, body horror, and themes of psychological and sexual abuse, so be mindful of that.

Drawing Len was the easiest part. The human form is something I'm used to, even if I had to study the ribcage, spine and hip bones a lot to draw him. Then came the wings, which I'd also drawn before, and they were hard but not too much.

What made me almost give up on this multiple times was the spinal cords and the hands. Well, the hands I knew I could do, there is just a f*ckton of them but I've drawn a lot of hands in my life; I knew it would be tedious and a little hard but not impossible. But the spines?????? God, that was hard. It was too hard.

I learned the three different groups of bones that make up the spine. I learned how different they are in shape and how different they look being rotated. But in the end I had to resort to 3D models, which I downloaded online, and they were not rigged or not in the way I needed them to be, so I proceeded to pose each vertebra individually until I got something close enough to what I needed. Then I painted over the 3D model, like, everything, because I decided to use a textured brush that could not be replicated easily by messing around with filters.

The hands I also photobashed from 3D models that I posed myself but it was much easier to pose them since they were already rigged. I was dreading them but they ended up being much easier than the spines.