Angelo Aliveby *VenGethenian

Digital Art / Drawings / Other

Angelo is a character in a project I've been fussing with inattentively since my senior year of high school -- Heaven's Mafia. In brief, the premise is this: 24 dead sinners serve their time in Purgatory by killing babies for God. Oh, and they're all drawn as furries in this very formulaic style I totally ripped off from Jeff Smith's Bone. No I don't know why dead people all appear as different animals, just go with it. Anyway, Angelo is their de facto leader. He used to be a hitman for the actual Mafia before he died pretty much the way you would expect a hitman for the Mob to die. Also, his name creatively means "angel of death" in Italian. CAN YOU TELL I MADE THIS UP AS A TEENAGER?

So... the thing about dead people is they used to be alive. And the thing about my Heaven's Mafia characters is I've never drawn a single one of them the way they looked before they died. You know... until tonight.

I suck at drawing on the computer, and this was done in iScribble. It will be finished properly in Photoshop whenever I have time to work on it, but in the meantime it stands as a study of how my style has changed and how my perception of my own characters changes over time. Since I've never really envisioned these characters as humans, the challenge is to make their living forms reflect the animals they appear as in the comic. Angelo is supposed to be a very wolf-like person. I actually feel like I've succeeded in that with my character design for him.

The point is... this is a quick demonstration of 10 years' difference in my art with the same character, from 2002-2012.