This work was an interesting one and was a lot different from what I usually do. I started with this idea of two people making up the majority of a third person. I wasn’t sure how to go about it, so I started sketching some ideas. A big thing I had in mind was a venn diagram, or some sort of overlapping shapes that made up the whole. I did a lot of messing around trying to figure out the shapes and how they should go.

I drew up some sketches then decided to try to mock them up in photoshop the best way I could that would get my idea across.

The sketches I had everyone was roughly the same size, and I just overlaid them to see what I could do with it. A friend of mine suggested a sort of venn diagram type look with overlapping color, much like a color diagram that explains the properties of color when used in light. You know, red + blue = purple, but red + blue + yellow = white.

So I filled them in and got to thinking about where all three of them would intersect, perhaps there would be a white heart.

I liked the luminosity of this sketch, and of course, the texture of my sketchbook paper. But the bodies weren’t right at all and I messed around with ditching them entirely.

I thought that was a little too weird looking. Floating heads rotating around a heart? Not exactly what I wanted.

So I went back to the lineart and brought both of the intersecting figures into the portrait.

This worked a lot better and I thought I could definitely work with it! I just had to do a little resizing and fiddling. Then I was thinking, well, if Falco is red and Brooke is blue, shouldn’t Azra be yellow? Back to that color diagram.

By all means the heart should be white if I am going with a light in color diagram theme. However, the white heart looked strange, and I thought it was more apt to make the statement that he only had a heart if it included both of them. There is very little of that heart that belongs to just one or the other, or even to Azra.

I looked back at the others, where I started, and decided I liked the luminescence of the first ones on top of the brown fiber background more than the muddy greenish color. So I tinkered.

I liked the background texture and colors I had in the weird floating heart rotating heads version, so I tried to work out a way to add a little more texture. I thought the intersecting people might have needed something, too, and I thought. What can I add?

Falco represents the past (the left) — which is also represented by the forest. Brooke represents the future (the right) — which is also represented by the city. Azra does not feel fully comfortable in either, and exists somewhere in between. So there came my texture: