Ironic - Comparison

I frequently find myself startled when I finish a piece at how much my skills have improved in just the past few years.

This is for the #KickYourOwnAss group challenge here. (Love that group!) The idea is to revisit the oldest image in your DA gallery. In my case it turned out to be this from 2007, which is great, because I'd been thinking about revisiting this one for a while.

Usually I start with black-and-white lines and then color, like traditional comic-book illustration. When I drew the original, I was still drawing the lines with pencil and inking with a paintbrush. When this group challenge came up, I decided to do something different and make it even more challenging for me by skipping the usual line-work in Illustrator and doing a full digital painting in Photoshop. This is only the 2nd digital painting I've done this way, and it turned out a lot better than I'd expected!

Here are the finished pieces



I also uploaded a process image with some comments about how I created this, like how I got the tears the way I liked.