Title: Misty day, remains of the judgment
Date: 04/30/2007
Size: 54" x 72" (4½ ft. x 6 ft.)
Material: Canvas on Wooden Frame
Medium: Oil

Anyone who's played Silent Hill 2 and is even a remote fan of that stellar horror video game series will likely know what this is. It is a life-size replica of the famous "Misty day, remains of the judgment" painting found hanging on display in the Historical Society in the game, originally created by the series' monster designer Masahiro Ito. I did this painting as a mass series of Silent Hill-related artwork for my Senior Seminar Art course last year.

I've wanted to do a really good replica of this awesome painting for a long time now, and last year in the seminar course I got that opportunity. At the time I felt that I reached a point where I should push my skills to the next level by expanding the scale of my work and trying new mediums such as oil. So when I decided to undertake the monumental task of reproducing this great painting that only exists within a videogame, I figured, "Heck, if I'm going to go to the trouble of painting an exact replica.....why not do it life-size?"

I had already done a few variations of this painting in my other work that involved Pyramid Head, but doing an exact reproduction of the entire painting as seen in the game, that's something entirely different.

I chose to use oil as the medium, just as I imagine the one in the game would've been done. I had worked only with acrylic prior to doing this piece, so I practiced a bit with the medium beforehand by doing some smaller-scale paintings in oil. The idea of doing this piece in the first place was one of the main motivations for branching out and to start using oil.

To begin, I had to construct the wooden bars and stretch the canvas myself because the exact dimensions that I needed weren't quite available in the pre-made canvases at the art stores. After very careful examination of the painting in-game and its relative size to the average proportional height of a man like the protagonist, James, I determined that it should be about 6 feet wide. Now measuring the proportional height & width of the in-game painting as it appeared on screen I was able to determine that my large-scale reproduction would need to be about 4-and-a-half feet high. Translating to inches it's exactly 54" x 72", the largest I've ever worked in yet.

For as accurate and precise a reproduction as possible, I used a grid system to map out the placement of each of the objects in the painting in pencil. From then on it was just a matter of painting it all in, starting with various shades of gray for the background area. Then working towards the foreground, I started rendering in the hanging caged corpses and last but not least, 'ol PH himself with his mighty spearhead front and center.