Rat

The progression of this picture: First, I drew a starving face base. Then I thought, ooh Rat. So I drew a very sketchy face. Then I drew a neck, and some shoulders, and some very badly sketched clothes, etc. Eventually it all ended up being a sketch of a crazy looking Rat.

Then I thought, what if I drew his younger self, looking very dead but proper, as his 'shadow'. So I drew a rounder, healthier face, framed with shorter, clean-cut hair. But dead, bored eyes. Then I thought, why not give him smart clothes, to contrast? His parents dressed him up to look the part of a son and pretend to the world that he wasn't crazy.

Then, since he was a shadow, he needed to be shaded. So I shaded all of him, including his face. Of course then I look to my original sketch, and sort of cringe; it's horribly sketchy. So I fix up the lines, shade it in (though with the pencil, the blood splotches and random holes in his clothing make him look more like a calico cow than anything).

And then I just decided to unshade the shadow's face since it looked odd.

The text at the bottom is just a little snip from his first murder, and I thought having the text grow more sketchy ((erm...more like my normal writing, should I see a problem in this?)) as it progressed to show his breaking sanity.

Drawn in: Literature