Moments After the End

Moments After the End explores tranquility after hardship – a chance to rest at the end of a long road. It’s a moment of peace, underscored by the awareness that peace is always fleeting. The abundance of nature and the warm glow of the lanterns offers freedom and clarity, yet a tension persists under the calm.

In this post, I’ll share the emotional spark that shaped Moments After the End along with the symbolic elements woven throughout. In the second section, I’ll walk through the creative process, from rough pencil lines to the fully rendered final piece.

The Inspiration for Moments After the End

The art began with a simple question:

What does the end of a difficult chapter feel like?

It isn’t triumph.

It isn't collapse.

It's something subtler – like a wavering exhale after years of tension.

This piece reflects a transitional state – a sense of emergence, of stepping beyond constraint – even if the moment isn’t perfect or fully resolved. It captures the instant when the self recognizes its freedom, even if the body is still learning how to trust it.

Symbolic Choices

Much of my work explores the tension between machinery and organic life – a symbolic dialogue between confinement and transformation – and Moments After the End is the most nature-driven piece I’ve created to date.

Here, wilderness dominates. Nature isn’t fighting for space – it's already reclaimed it.

The world of machinery and steel structures sits in the distance, more memory than threat – a reminder of limitation that has no power in the present.

The robed spirits gather with each other in quiet reflection. Faceless, they become universal – they are anyone who has walked through difficulty and arrived somewhere safe, even if only temporarily.

Symbols of guidance and clarity appear throughout the piece: lanterns drift softly, casting warm light through the darkness. And a lone cardinal – a recurring symbol in my work representing transformation and upward movement – sits quietly but unmistakably, its small presence impossible to ignore.

With those themes in mind, I set to work shaping the image one line at a time, watching the concept grow into something tangible on the page.

The Process for Moments After the End

This image began as a loose pencil sketch on paper. I think I even starting inking it... However, in my excitement to get the idea down on paper I rushed the initial drawing and afterward I realized the figures' poses and proportions were not up to par. 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 and the plant life around him 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 planets, the eyes of the spirits, 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 despite its visual connection to comic book art, 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 for me than most of my other art. Some of that is the digital drawing and a decision to forego hatching lines in order to create a cleaner, more open feel to the drawing. But mostly I think it's just the imagery itself, which skews so heavily toward the growth and nature side of my art.

Either way, I have fond memories of the creative process behind this one – it marked a meaningful shift in how I approach my work.

Thanks for spending time in this world with me.

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I post process videos, sketches, and behind-the-scenes work as new art takes shape. If you'd like to see the next stages of this world as it's built, you can find me here:

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