After a few conversations with a friend over ongoing to-do lists, and the pissing contest of who can finish a picture first, I will openly admit, I had one picture on my to-do list from 9 years ago, that I wanted to deal with and then never, ever got to dealing with. It required too much painting skill and patience, and the original image size was exceedingly small. Way too much work required, and wasn't in the mood. But no more! I dredged the sucker out of my art pile, and went to work on creating my ugly as dirt thing out of it.

The original image was actually a small texture file, for little 3D books in a texture class way back in post secondary. I decided to do a sort of necronomicon, and made something that was originally an exploded photomanipulated onion, split and flipped around and a bunch of other things, to make something surreal, that if shown to someone apparently was "One of those ink blotch tests where the subject could be anything." I saw a three eyed demon, and eventually used a much more simplified drawing design of it, which I dubbed "Bird Face". Granted, I always kept the freaky-deaky blotchy thing, and knew someday I'd reworked it. So, out comes the file, and here comes the painting.

Painting version is much different than exploded onion version, which is still different than the more simplistic doodles I have done in the past. I think I called him "Bird Face" because of the really, really freaky long lower jawbone and the sort of shoulder ruffles, that give a bit of a bird-like pomp. Basically, this whole thing is the paint over of the severely incoherent original file and it looks... just as odd as I intended. Boy, is he an ugly one. Probably my most disjointed original character design of any I ever had.

Photoshop 5, CS4