Jessica Harper as Suzy Bannion
(Suspiria [1977])

Those knowledgeable of horror films have probably guessed by now that my viewing of Dario Argento’s Suspiria has inspired me. First I draw Dario’s daughter (twice), now a frame from his most famous film. After being sorely disappointed with my last three drawings (two appearing on this site) and subsequently giving them less textural and shading detailed than I could have, I decided to do a drawing where the whole focus was to capture as much texture and subtle shading as I could.

That being said, I’m very very happy with how this render turned out. Never mind the fact that after I laid down the line work, I spent a long time staring at the photo, asking myself, “How the hell am I going to render her crocheted sweater and her hair?” To my surprise, I really didn’t have to do a lot of experimenting to figure out the solutions; instead it just involved creative usage of techniques I’ve done before, and was more than happy to see they worked out better than I expected. I still feel like I could have made the image look even better if I spent more time with a few elements (namely the hair and the sweater); however, that’s inevitable.

I’m aware of a few issues with shape and lack of definition here and there, but that doesn’t bother me very much since it wasn’t really my focus (and I didn’t abandon the project.) The only thing that really bugs me is the mismatched eye lines because I drew it, corrected it, corrected it again, and for the life of me could not get the eyes to look at the cup. I really did try to make that look right. Oh well. Just look at the shading, damn it!