'Moments After the End' Represents a Major Turning Point in My Life

More than almost any other image I've made, Moments After the End reflects the particular life circumstances in which I made it. I began work on the drawing around February 2024, shortly after recovering from double jaw surgery (upper and lower jaws at the same time). The image was heavily inspired by an intense few moments I had after leaving the emergency room a few days after the surgery – something I would describe as an ego death experience.

When I started work on this one, I was feeling peaceful and immensely relieved at the positive outcome of the surgery...but also a bit haunted.

In many ways, my time recovering from the surgery marked the death of who I had been up to that point in my life, and a strange, sort of sad awareness around that fact sparked the inspiration for Moments After the End.

There are some specific bits of symbolism here I'll touch on, and I'll also chat about the actual art-making process, which (despite beginning on paper) ended up being almost entirely digital.

The Inspiration for Moments After the End

I've talked about this on the blog in the past, particularly in my write-up for Pillars of Affliction, but in 2021 I began a long series of surgeries and orthodontics to correct misaligned jaws and crooked teeth. It was expensive, painful, and often scary as hell because a positive outcome was not at all guaranteed. (The alternative, however – which was to do nothing – was guaranteed to result in a bad outcome and a difficult life).

The culmination of the medical process was a complex procedure that effectively severed all the bones in the lower half of my face – including breaking my lower jaw on both sides plus removing my upper jaw from my skull and and splitting it into three sections – rearranging the pieces, and bolting it all back together.

Incredibly, mercifully, that surgery went well. In fact, the entire process went as well as it possibly could have.

As you might imagine, however, the recovery for that double jaw surgery was...a lot. My face swelled up like a balloon and I had some intense bruising that ran down to my sternum. I had a hard plastic mouthpiece wired onto my upper teeth, and any time I wasn't eating (or slurping to be more precise) I had to keep my jaws held tightly shut with some very stout rubber bands, which made it almost impossible to talk. (Basically like being "wired shut" except I could open up to eat, brush, and do some incredibly painful stretches for my face muscles.)

My lower lip and chin were numb and I was drooling everywhere, and I also had an adverse reaction to the painkillers and the anesthesia which led to a trip to the ER about three days after the surgery.

I left the ER with a catheter stuck in me and a bag of urine taped to my leg. So there I was looking like I was in anaphylactic shock with my face swollen up and a catheter bag hanging out of my shorts haha. I needed to go to the drug store to pick up some meds, and while standing there in the store in that state I had one of the most remarkable experiences of my life.

Preston, as I understood him to be, completely disappeared. All thoughts of self-concern, worry, or doubt were gone. All my hopes and dreams vanished. Any effort I'd ever made to seem smart, interesting, handsome, etc. suddenly seemed absurd. There was no trace of any recognizable person left in me, and instead I just had this simple, stunning awareness of my immediate surroundings.

I remember perceiving my environment in great detail: the hum of the fluorescent lights, the beeping of the cash register, the scuff marks on the tile floors, the dust on the shelves. Without any thoughts to distract me, the raw data of experience came through with complete clarity.

I actually wasn't familiar with the idea of an ego death at that point (despite meditating regularly for years, I'm pretty casual about the spiritual side of things), but after some online searches I realized that was an accurate description of what I'd felt in the drug store.

I carried that experience with me for a few weeks while I rested and recovered from the surgery, and then one day a wonderful thing happened: all the thoughts and feelings I'd been carrying about the surgery and the ego death suddenly blossomed in my mind into the imagery for Moments After the End.

The "visions" for my art often come to me mysteriously – an image simply appears in my mind and then I expand and elaborate on it once I start drawing. But in this case, there was a specific thing that triggered it - a pair of bushes in my neighborhood with gnarled limbs that had a lantern hanging from one of the branches.

Sadly, I deleted my original reference photos of it. The lantern has since been removed and it looks like some of the limbs were cut off, but these are the bushes. (At what point does a bush become a tree? 'Cuz this thing feels more like a tree haha. Someone tell me the difference.)

Also, bunny.

There was something so strange and magical to me about the fact that a person hung a lantern from these weird, twisted plants with their scaly bark. And in an instant, the imagery for Moments After the End came to me – complete with the robed figures, the large planets, and the distant cityscape.

I started sketching it out that same day.

There are a few bits of imagery here worth touching on. Broadly speaking, forms of machinery, wires, and industrial elements in my art reflect feelings of stress, anxiety, and overthinking, while elements of nature reflect feelings of peace, clarity, and authenticity.

This scene is very much dominated by nature, indicating the deep sense of peace I felt at the time. Prior to this, there was a sort of sci-fi industrial flavored cityscape in the background of all my art. But here, significantly, it's in the distant background, barely seen above the trees.

It's also notable that the figures are robed and have no faces. A friend described them as spirits, and I think that's an accurate term, particularly in light of the experience in the drug store that inspired the art. My double jaw surgery also changed the appearance of my face, something I was struggling with when I looked in the mirror each day, and that probably contributed to the faceless figures as well.

However, I remember feeling a sense of restlessness and trepidation during this moment of my life. Beneath the feeling of peace was a growing sense of urgency. I'd been so focused on surviving that main procedure that I hadn't been able to give much thought to what was next, and I now needed to confront that looming uncertainty in my life.

I knew there would be new struggles and challenges ahead, and I tried to express that in the pensive, slightly worried expressions of the spirits.

I mentioned at the top that Moments After the End marked the culmination of who I'd been to that point in my life. Embarking on that medical process forced me to "wake up" in life and develop a level of discipline and emotional regulation I'd never had before. I began seeing a therapist for the first time, and my efforts to develop better mental toughness caused me to start picking apart the knots of doubt, fear, and limiting beliefs that had held me back in life.

It's been almost two years since that double jaw surgery, and with that bit of hindsight I can see how much the recovery period served as a pivot point into the next era for me. The energy that had been committed to moving through the medical process has since been available to help me develop my art, my career, and friendships with new people, and it's had a tremendous impact on the shape of my life.

The Process for Moments After the End

As with all the drawings I'd done to this point, I originally sketched out the idea for Moments After the End in pencil on paper. I think I even starting inking it... However, I rushed the initial drawing in my excitement to get the idea down on paper, and afterward I realized the figures' poses and proportions kind of sucked, haha. I just hadn't made it with nearly enough care. Also, this was a complex image for me to tackle with all its twisting branches and figures in different poses, and I knew I wanted the freedom to rework major parts of it over time.

That led to a decision to re-draw the image digitally. Using the original pencil work as a rough guide, I heavily altered most of the figures' poses. I also reshaped the branches to feel more balanced and visually satisfying.

I also remember spending a lot of time subtly resizing the figures to make them appear closer or further away relative to where they sit on the tree. That sounds simple, but prior to this all my figures effectively existed on a single two-dimensional plane, so there was a bit of growth needed on my part to make that happen.

I LOVED inking this digitally though, because it gave me the freedom to create white lines and shapes over black marks. I talked about this in detail in my post for the ink work, but much of the foliage was created by filling in a solid black area and then making white marks over it, something that would've been much more difficult to do on paper.

The boy standing in the crook of the tree is a great example of this, I did a lot of that work by creating white marks over solid black areas.

Figuring out a color palette for this one was a major challenge though. I also talked about this in more detail in a dedicated post for the flat color, but I originally planned to have green be the dominant color. But the more I worked on it the less that felt right to me, and bit by bit I shifted it into blues and purples, which matched the mood of the image much better to me.

Funny how my art always seems to choose its own color palette. No matter what I intend for it while I'm drawing, once I begin doing color, the art seems to have a mind of its own and I just have to set aside what I want and figure out what it wants.

Final color separations and color palette

But once I had the color palette dialed in, the actual rendering was fairly straightforward (if still time-consuming.) As always, that process involved selecting each object in Photoshop and adding a slight gradient to it, then creating texture using dodge and burn tools set to a spatter brush. I then lassoed out shadows and edge highlights. All of that work was done with the large planet in the background as the primary light source, with each of the lanterns providing their own, smaller, light source.

The final steps were to add glows to the lanterns, the spirits' eyes, the planets, and the lights in the city towers. I also created a subtle sense of atmospheric perspective by lightening the actual line art on distant objects, such as the city towers and planets.

This work is surprisingly labor intensive and I really think of it as painting. A look at the art with the lines turned off shows just how much rendering work is happening on an image like this.

Final color renders with the line art turned off

Some Last Thoughts

Moments After the End has a different feel to it for me than most of my other art. Some of that is the digital drawing and a decision to omit all hatching lines in order to create a cleaner, more open feel to the drawing. But mostly I think its just the imagery itself, which is free of the usual tubes, wires, and machinery that is kind of a staple of my art.

Either way, I have fond memories of the creative process for this one and it will always mark a major turning point in my life.

Thanks as always for reading. What do you think of the art on this one? Leave me a comment below, and if you're new here, subscribe to get email notifications on new blog posts. Cheers!