Creation Date: April 05, 2015 A tormented woman is surrounded by voices of all volumes and motives. She can't take it anymore. >This is a very personal piece for me. The original concept for this arose during a deep depression back in early 2009. Once my skills increased, I recreated it in 2011 but knew at the time I could do even better down the road. Well, I just revisited the concept again for 2015 and came up with a brand new artwork. Although the artwork is new and improved it is still showing the very same dark emotional yet surreal concept. I like this brand new version best as it conveys the mood much more powerfully with a menacing feel while yet managing to be somewhat pleasing to the eyes. Rather than work from an old scene of one of my previous tries at this concept, I started fresh. After posing the central character and adjusting her expression to fit the piece, I rendered her on a neutral dark gray background prop. I used a combination of IDL and dramatic spot lights to create the dark shadows and stark contrast. I needed the lighting to set the mood just as much as her pose and expression did so. In postwork, I added several texture overlays and used a mask to "cut out" the central figure from the textures so they would only overlay the background and not her. Only the top most overlay is on both the character and the background. I created that layered background to have a look of either those veins you see at the edges of your eyes when you're looking at a bright light or neural pathways (it can work both ways) to show that the voices are from within her. The many mouths around the scene were all rendered one at a time on a complete human figure (slightly different from the one in the main scene with different textures) using a variety of expressions and phonemes. I then took each render and erased everything except for the lips and inside the mouth while in Photoshop. After arranging the different mouths around the figure on different layers, I placed them behind her. It took me a while to figure out the right way to blend the mouths into the background but I finally managed to do so with a variety of layer styles to create the final effect. Copyright © 2015 Lizzie Prusaczyk of Dream 9 Studios. All rights reserved.