Shattered
Originally this one was called “Life” but I had a change of heart and felt like shattered was a more fitting name.
The origin of this artwork, the very essence of it, was anger. Anger that was brought to this world through failure. Not once, not twice but many many times to the point where you want to crush your skull and rip your hair out, for you will never find the answer to the problem that is tormenting without end. It could be something like, landing a job. Getting one refusal after the other and not receive a single job interview even after sending out you 400th application. It could be simple things such as a bad grade or playing ranked in League of Legends and going on a losing streak that is longer than the story of A Song of Ice and Fire. It could also be something much more terrible but point is, when you geniunely try your best every single time, you analyse your mistakes and try to improve, you go the extra mile and perhaps partake in a bunch of internships for your CV. You do this and you do that but the result stays the same. It feels like running your car into this invisible wall we call life but each time you crash progressively harder. You try again and again but no matter what you do, nothing seems to work out. Your confidence shatters. Doubt is building up and you start wondering whether it is your lack of competence that is holding you back from fulfilling this one task that keeps you away from success. You might also just start searching for something or someone other than yourself to blame, which makes this whole situation so much worse. Should the outcome be influenced by anyone else but yourself then the problem is not entirely in your control. You are depended on something or somebody else.
In my case, something has happened that left me in a state of confusion. No matter what I did, it was wrong. Fueled with anger I turned on aggressive music and tried to channel all this fury into a single image. The reference for the pose was fairly easy to make but finding a proper background posed more of a challenge. I paged through my biggest pond of inspiration, the Tokyo Ghoul Artbook by Sui Ishida and found an artwork of him that had quite an interesting design. I previously worked a lot with green and red because if the tone is right, these two colors work together like the stars with the night.
Coming back to anger, I feel like it is being misinterpreted many a time. You hear phrases like “Control your anger.” or “Don’t be angry”, when anger is nothing but just another emotion. It can cause quite the chaos but only if handled incorrectly or suppressed. Try to find an outlet that helps you maneuver it because whether you like it or not, someday anger will come knocking on your door and it is on you whether you let it ravage your home or invite it in and try to calm it down with a cup of coffee.