✦✧ Vael ✦✧

Years ago I drew an ultra-realistic portrait of him but I think it’s slowly showing its flaws to me now… you can get away with more with stylisation 😼 and it’s also just generally more appealing

Social Commentary

This piece was intended as a sort of vent comparison between how Nick and Billie Eilish are treated similarly when exposed to the public.

While Nick has features that could be seen as “misleadingly” older, they’re features that the people around me as well as myself had at his age. Plus there’s the whole thing about him looking similar to other characters in more mainstream media. He’s wayyyy too overheated.

So this brought up a small dilemma: to redesign or not to redesign?

Ultimately, I decided not to (although the temptation to never goes away). I feel that I would be doing the real-world counterparts of this problem a disservice if I changed him. They can’t really redesign themselves, and why should they?

Adding to this, I rarely see male representation of this problem. Women 100% have it worse, but when it happens to men I think it gets swept under the rug or passed off as not that serious (see: Justin Bieber)

Also, I like his design. That should be reason enough.

The Making Of

This took NINETEEN HOURS and seventeen minutes*

I was so done by the time I got onto the background. Despite most of the clutter being photobashed in, it was making me want to tear my hair out.

The phone was originally yellow, like Billie’s.

There was also a section where I decided to colour the whole piece, but it looked so abysmal and unnatural I switched back to B+W. I’m not even going to show a picture of that because it looks so bad.

The finished version is not actually true black and white, it’s overlayed with a slightly soft dusty blue to contrast the red text.

*most of my pieces take 10 hours or less on average.

Note: this was written long before my recent Age Up? poll so you can tell this subject’s been on my mind for a long time.