Surviving a Misfire

12″x18″, Oil Pastel

Technique
My brother-in-law was cleaning his gun and shot himself through his hand. He’s all right and has nearly made a full recovery (no broken bones, no nerve damage, and very minimal sensation loss). The difficult thing was my wife and I rushed down to his house (where he had shot himself) and cleaned up the mess so that his wife wouldn’t come home to fine blood splatter over everything thing…ugh it was disturbing . One of the toughest things I remember after securing the gun from the accident was finding the shell casing on the ground and realizing that it was one of his hollow tipped fragmenting round – NOT the type of bullet you want to get shot with, and yet miraculously it was a very clean through-and-through wound. I intended this picture to have a more monochromatic feel to it, with a lean towards being dark, depressing, and dangerous. I used oil pastels for the main imagery in the picture, with some charcoal in the background.

Photoshop
I increased the darks and played with the middle gray values for this picture a lot. I also did extensive cleaning of white spots and marks threw out the entire picture. I felt that some of my texture was lost in this work digitally from the original, however I was able to gain richer values throughout the entire piece over all.