Onyrica

Milestones - [ Commission ]

Added 2019-12-27 10:51:14 +0000 UTC

This was such a wonderful piece to work on for so many reasons and I'm incredibly honored to have been given the chance to make it.

The illustration commemorates the five-year cancer-free milestone of Cub - a leukemia survivor. Cub was diagnosed when he was very little and spent more than 2 years undergoing treatment at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital.

I remember crying my eyes out when I was first asked to work on this and shown all the pictures and video I'd be using for reference. I can't even begin to fathom what it must have been like to get through something like this and I can only be grateful I was given a chance to be a part of it through illustrating this special anniversary.

The illustration features Cub (center), Dr. Pui - who treated cub (left), Abdallah - a Youtube gamer who Cub got to meet through Make-a-Wish (right) - Cub's mother (back, right) and Cub's father (back, center), plus the family pets. The setting is inspired on Mario Kart- one of Cub's favourite games.

The hardest part about this was getting the composition right, as I'd never drawn this many figures in an actual setting. The layer juggling and masking to make sure nothing was deleted in case I needed to shimmy a kart over an inch was absolutely mental. Of course, I inevitably figured out something needed shifting right after I decided to flatten the layers. Because life just be like that.

I also decided to draw this in a completely different style to my usual, as the second hardest part was figuring out how to draw full grown adults riding gummy-bear karts. A lot of Disney went down in the making of this and I now speak to squirrrells and see menial tasks such as grocery shopping as an opportunity for musical numbers.