In Progress Shots of "Photograph", a 2017 Illustration by Aimee Cozza

Story time I suppose for the words portion of this in progress shots post. I’ve written about my original character Azra before (and he appears in many of my works, as you probably already know as a reader of my blog posts), and one of his partners Falco. Long story short, he is vehemently against having his photo taken. For various logical reasons, such as his inability to age due to being a vampire, which would give him away on any out dated license or otherwise, he absolutely will not pose for a photo or take one. The only tangible photo that anyone knows of is his mugshot, which he uses for his ID, passport photo, etc etc (these documents are all forged anyway). So having a photo of Azra is a real treat. Falco knows this (despite having some of those reasons as well, he is not so staunchly against being recorded), and here and there he’ll sneak photos with his phone — when Azra’s asleep, when his back is turned, that kind of thing. He’ll usually delete it later, lest Azra find it and get upset with him, but there’s one photo he just likes too much that he can’t bring himself to delete.

That’s this one!

I started adding colors after that. I wanted to go with a very near greyscale palette, like it was in a low light setting and hard to make out any color, plus the fact that they are pretty pale and colorless to begin with.

I redid the sheets a bunch more times too, trying to make it look more convincing. A few reference photos later and I seemed to get it somewhere I wanted it, applying a “grain” like a bad cell phone photo and a ton of blown out space. But I forgot something…

The door! I always seem to forget doors in a lot of my interior illustrations, which is obnoxious! I did it in Hynopompic Hallucination as well and later returned when I realized to add a dumb door. So I started with an open door but not all the way.