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lenartlenartlenart-blog · 8 years ago

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Making of ｓａｃｒｅｄコーラ

Alright, let’s try this whole new fad that is blogging.

As I’ve already mentioned some months ago, I’m working (although sorta passively these last weeks) on a comic book about a man who meets God. The shtik is that YOU get to decide what he actually sees, but every option turns out surreal and disappointing (and hilarious of course). Working title: Deity Dispenser.

For the comic I did a bunch of research on religious art, especially christian depictions of God. I came across these weird trippy depictions of the holy trinity:

Trifacial trinity by an anonymous member of Cuzco School, between 1750 and 1770 (Yeah, it’s real!)

Holy Trinity by Fridolin Leiber, late 19th century (Again, this is the official lore!)

I was already planning to do another t-shirt series and I always wanted to experiment with subverting religious imagery (think black metal). The paintings above made me go: “Dude these are wicked sick I would totally wear any of these on a t-shirt!” so I figured I’d do my own.

First I took the image that hangs in every house on the Slovenian countryside: The Sacred Heart of Jesus Christ. It depicts the man himself, pointing at the heart with one hand and extending three fingers with the other. So, how do we turn this widely recognised image on it’s head? The main three elements I focused on were the face, the heart and the halo.

The Sacred Heart of Jesus Christ. I can’t find the source for this specific artwork. Sorry.

Being obsessed with creepy eyes, the face was the first thing to go. Remove the friendly looking face, pop on some eyeballs, a job well done.

The heart, being the center of the composition and the main point of the artwork, had to be replaced with something just as important. So I replaced it with my logo. The fact that the lowercase “t” is also an inverted cross made it all the more relevant.

The halo totally needed to be altered somehow, but nothing felt right. I tried a pentagram (overused), a mouth with pointy teeth (too noticable) and different shapes (the triangle was taken) but in the end I just made it black. The halo on the original is all shiny and holy, so making it black gets the point across, yet keeps it clean and simple.

Once I was somewhat happy with the concept, I started sketching it out digitally:

The first sketch

I was going to put some tentacles and some cryptic writing in the background, but in the end I decided in favor of simplicity.

The frame is a church window frame, typical for gothic architecture. It’s there to separate the design from a black background.

The numbers, Mason! What do they mean?

Kids, with art and illustration it’s totally ok to cheat if it makes the piece look better. That’s why for the background I used a simple white to black gradient, which I then painted over with a textured brush.

Wassup.

At some point the whole logo-instead-of-heart part started to bother me a bit. Don’t get me wrong; shamelessly putting your logo on everything is totally cool, but putting it at the center of a piece makes it look like and ad. It works for stickers, but making a t-shirt look like an ad is something you only do once you’re a famous brand.

Around the time I convinced the narcissist part of myself to replace the logo with something else, I was also super into vaporwave.

(For the filthy normies: Vapowave is a musical genre and an art style that revolves around slowing down easy listening tunes and making ironic/nostalgic collages out of 90’s imagery, roman statues and Japanese writing.)

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I’m inverting religious imagery here, while vaporwave inverts consumerist imagery, and what else is religion if not whoops would you look at that it almost got a bit too political there.

Anyway, I replaced the heart with a soda can. At first I just made it a can of Sprite, but I felt more could be done with it. Then I made it a Fanta can, but altered the logo so that it said “Phanta”.

As in “phantasm”, get it?

Don’t worry, a lot of my friends didn’t get it either. That’s why I changed it again.

Finally, I made the can into a “Kokoro kōra” ("heart cola”), a made up heart-themed cola brand. (Shout out to my MVP Diederik for coming up with the name and the japanese letters.)

I painted the can and the heart design separately, then put them together. How did I do that? Normal people can skip this next part.

I duplicated the layer with the heart design and used a different blending option on each copy:

With one copy I used overlay, which makes the blending realistic, but the shiny parts of the can obscure the design (left).

The other copy is a regular layer with 25% opacity (middle).

When both of them are visible, you get the can on the right!

The results are ｒｅｆｒｅｓｈｉｎｇソーダ.

I took a bunch of screenshots during the process and put them into an animated gif. The version below had to be compressed for Tumblr, but you can see it in full quality on my website.

#jesus #jesus christ #jesuslovesyou #sacred #sacred heart #religion #religious #religious art #vaporwave #aesthetic

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