Crippled Inside

This was partially inspired by how I was/am feeling and the John Lennon song (Crippled Inside from the 1971 Imagine album). Both the song and the artwork is about the fact that no matter how hard you try to hide it or minimize it, and whether it looks like it from the outside or not, you can’t change the fact that on the inside you are broken. I haven’t created a personal piece like this in a while so it was about damn time that I did. Most of the time, I create artworks from ideas that I sketched out usually days or sometimes even months or years before. This time though, the idea for this artwork struck me as I sat down at my workstation and I immediately set about to create it before the idea and inspiration escaped me.

This artwork is actually two separate scenes that I rendered individually then combined in postwork. The primary scene was rendered in Superfly with three soft area lights with depth of field on. The subtle tears on her were painted directly on her face textures and enhanced with effects maps and and a mask. The secondary scene was rendered also with Superfly and the same light setup. In postwork, I combined the two renders by placing them on separate layers and adjusting the opacity of those layers then applying a layer style to the secondary scene to give it the glowing effect. I used a layer mask and cracks style brush to “break” the secondary render. I then used a few Photoshop actions and adjustment layers to adjust the colors and contrast of the overall artwork. To finish the artwork, I ran it through the ON1 Effects plugin.

• D9S Angie & D9S Myla by Dream 9 Studios