The Illustrated Man(boy)

The next physical book I aim to publish is the first Lara & the Witch volume, which includes five and a half stories, from "Like A Good Neighbor" to "Here To Help."  As a bonus to those who purchased the actual book (as opposed to the digital versions), I included a bonus flash piece (newly-named "A Short Interlude") and after looking at what Big was doing with one of his future collections (though at the rate he's going, it's probably already available), I wanted to throw some illustrations into it.

One of the ideas I had for an image would be of Old Widow Holcomb, young and beautiful, but with her true old woman face creeping in on one side, similar to how Steve Ditko would show Peter Parker with half of his face as Spider-man.

Anyway, I did my best to get an image of a young and vibrant black-haired woman, and then one of an old one, and see if I couldn't merge the two.  It didn't really work Dikto-style, but I was able to take part of the old woman's features, resize them, and paste them onto the young woman's.  And I thought it looked pretty good, so I sent it to Big.

Maybe add a streak of grey in her hair on the right side?

He thought it could look better, though, and revised it himself with a program of his that works surprisingly well at smoothing out edges or replacing problematic images (such as hands with eight fingers or cars not touching the ground or Rish Outfield with his arm around a woman).  It works great at expanding on what's already there (for example, he put out a book recently, but misjudged the page count, so he had to adjust the cover to be bigger, and he had the program extrapolate what would naturally be beyond the borders of the finished art), but not at creating stuff out of whole cloth (or whole pixels).

Big fixed the lips on the old side, because it bothered him that they didn't match.

Big Version 1

So, this one doesn't look too bad.  But what it looks to me is cool Eighties prosthetic makeup being applied to a section of her face.  Cool makeup, but not really a transformation or revelation, which was more my intention.

Big Version 2

Big smoothed out her forehead, and it looks a little bit less makeup-y, but I told Big that I had actually liked the dividing line between her young visage and the old one, and that the lips were not MEANT to match.

Big Version 3

So, he made it VERY obvious, a split down the middle kind of thing, so you could see beauty on one side, and ugly on the other.  I explained that, at least in my head, what I wanted was the idea of the youth and looks being an outer shell, with the ugly old self being the layer underneath.

Big Version 4

So Big did this one, which has more of an eggshell quality splitting the two, and does seem to have a false skin layer feeling, kind of like Diana on the 1983 V miniseries.

So, what did I do?  Like an infuriating sitcom character, I told him I liked the original just fine, and just to go with that.  Don't you despise that kind of person?