♦ “Angel of Mine” » 108 Kb (Normal), 194 Kb (Original)

Yeah, yeah, it’s such a cliche, but what the hell—I wanted to give it a try. This was inspired by two suggestions from the “Ideas” section, both of which involved Miroku with wings. I guess I was intrigued by the visual of fallen-angel Miroku grasping the closest thing he’ll probably ever get to heaven. According to Buddhist tenets, life is a cycle of birth, death, and rebirth—the last of which Miroku’ll probably never get around to, considering that he faces a fate that, technically, cheats his soul from ever completing the cycle, and instead he has to settle for finding whatever heaven he can get during his short time on earth.

This might be the single biggest CG I’ve ever done; it’s so big that I had to shrink it to this size just to get it to fit into the browser frame, even though doing so would make it lose a lot of detail. The cropped version is available here and the uncropped large version here. I came up with a new coloring method for this one: I skipped the outline, limited all lines to the facial features, used the pen tool to fill in the base colors, and experimented liberally with shading and hues. The wings took me forever to do—I tried more versions than I can count (transparent, semi-transparent, glowy, etc.) before settling on this one. I don’t know if this one’s any better than the others, but I was in a hurry. The clouds annoyed me, too, so I need to practice on them more. They don’t look right.