The faith of transformation

My final art project for Photoshop class. Strongly styled off Yusuke Naora's FFX fayth statues, but with a broader theme. Transformation is painful and occasionally messed up and wrong, but it's always a moving process.

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Alrighty, now we get nitpicky. I'm very proud of this piece, so I'm going to go on and on and on about it.

The subject: Originally the person was supposed to be facing front, and the wings were going to be the bony butterfly section that we see on the left. The structure for them would have been exploding and stretching out of the ribcage and viscera would have been spilling everywhere: however, I did not trust my artistic ability to convey all that wonderfulness at the time. So I went with the back of the person, as well as a more stylized and recognizable wing.

The wings: Bird and butterfly, both symbolizing movement and in the butterfly's case, change. I wanted to add more vivid color to the butterfly section, but I didn't really know how... Just bending the ribs into the butterfly shape bothered me enough, because the remnants of anatomy kept insisting I was doing everything wrong. At least they gave me no bones about the wing: I (pardon the pun) winged that section almost completely, though I did look up lots of avian skeletons.

The background: Since it is sort of a fayth statue, of course I had to go with stone. I used two layers of marble with a mask in between them to provide more depth to the streaking, and then I colorized them with the Hue/Saturate tool. The roselike thing in the back is supposed to be a chrysalis and it's actually patterned like one--if you've seen a monarch chrysalis, you know how the butterfly's wings are pressed right up against the surface? That's how it looks when you remove the person. However, the original image color was neon green (I kid you not) and so I decided to change it to red in order to give more vibrancy to the picture. Several people have told me it now looks like a beating heart. I shrug and go "Sweet."

The... Did I leave anything out: Oh yes, the time. Lord, I spent so much time on this picture. It's been so long since I've honest to God fallen in love with something I'm working on, and this picture just rekindled everything I loved about drawing and Photoshopping and creating. I giggled every time I completed something. I grabbed random people out of my dorm and showed it to them. Even if people had told me it was terrible (which no one did--actually, someone asked me to do their CD covers based on my work, once they got a band together), I would have slogged on it anyway. I clocked over 24 hours on this, I lost sleep over it, and I nearly wrecked my shoulder for it, but you know what? I look at this picture now and smile and think, "It was so totally worth it..."

Okay, I'm done gushing now. Everyone has their silly moments.