So... this was completely an accident.

I was halfway done with a messy attempt at a SAI speedpaint when, for a break from the brushwork, I decided to start fiddling with backgrounds. The original background idea was to use some offset bokeh , which I had overlaid atop the character and hue-changed to purple like so. Overlaying the texture across the whole background made our poor Tengu-san disappear though, so I set out to find another suitable one for the background proper. This lovely paper texture popped up, so I gave it a try behind the character. Again, he disappeared because of the low opacities I'd not realized I'd been painting at. So, I thought, why not eliminate the opacity values by making a white fill layer beneath and then merging the two? Success!... except that the white had to be trimmed around the character to reveal the background beneath, and cropping with the wand tool ended up making him look like a paper cutout. I was about to scrap the texture and go back to the drawing board when an accidental click switching the layer mode to luminosity did this.

And my jaw dropped.


It brings to mind a kami revealed on damaged film ^^ Long story short, art this abstract is way out of my realm of expertise; it turned out totally opposite of what I'd been working towards XD But thanks to blind luck the image ended up way more neato than I could have hoped, so I thought I'd share it with you guys! In case anybody is wondering, he's a zombified tengu samurai character I'm playing in a paper-pencil RPG :)


Texture by wotjar-stock on DeviantArt
Art & Tengu Character by Me