My other piece for Hakubaikou's annual contest and one I didn't think I'd finish. I tried to create lines for this piece about four times before I decided I'd just let the piece go and not enter a second piece. Then inspiration struck quite hard on Friday and I felt compelled to try again. This time, suprisingly, I met with success. Set up the lines and decided to do a realism paint. Maybe fifteen to twenty hours later and it's as ready as it's ever gonna be I think.

The theme of Hakubaikou's contest this year is "passages" and I think few adults I know feel that there's any greater passage in life, save the passage into whatever waits for us when we die, than that into parenthood. I think for Kenshin especially, this moment would be poignant, a thing he never thought he'd attain in life. Probably for him, holding Kenji for the first time is like holding not just one miracle, but several miracles: a life, a family, love, a home, and many things he thought he'd never have again.

On the actual creation of the piece, I probably worked hardest on the hair. Face was actually surprising easy. I just got finished learning how to model a 3-dimensional face in Blender and so still had the contours and shapes fresh in my head. Hair though. For hair I pulled up pictures from three of my favorite realism pics and studied them before drawing on immense amounts of patience I didn't even know I had to redraw the hair shape three times before getting it right. I'm mostly satisfied with it now. Kenji's hair, surprisingly, is the only other thing that gave me a lot of trouble. I nearly modeled him on my cousin, who was born with a full head of dark-red hair, but couldn't locate the picture. Thus, trying to achieve baby-hair appearance was also more difficult than I anticipated. I hope I succeeded for the most part.

Photoshop CS
Wacom Intuos Tablet