bryankonietzko:

This is the bottom layer of a piece of press art I’m working on for the fast-approaching finale of The Legend of Korra Book 1. It seems appropriate to post it in the middle of the night since, well… the night is dark and full of terrors, and this thing is pretty spooky if I do say so myself.

I remember hearing the phrase “an artist always draws him- or herself no matter the subject” a couple times, and that is certainly hard to shake after attending art school where they have you do about 100 self-portraits before you graduate. We had Amon’s mask (which I designed) sculpted in CG as a reference for the animators, since the patterns can be tricky to draw in various angles. And even though I practically traced the mask in this illustration straight from the CG model, something about the lens distortion and the angle of the mask made it end up looking like me. When I mentioned it to my wife she said, “Yeah, I’ve been thinking that the whole time you were working on it but I didn’t want to say anything.” Apparently I’m evil.