The Tireless Lament of Past Selves

I began the initial drawing for The Tireless Lament of Past Selves in the summer of 2023 and finished the color in the fall of that same year. The initial conception of it marked a shift in my life away from a deep exploration of myself, my behaviors, and my past experiences (something I'd been working on heavily for the two years prior to this piece) and into a greater interest in building connections with new people and laying the foundation for the next stage of my life.

I'll begin here by chatting about the concept and symbolism for The Tireless Lament of Past Selves and then get into some details about the actual creative process for the finished color art.

The Concept for The Tireless Lament of Past Selves

In short, The Tireless Lament of Past Selves represents an effort to turn my personal exploration of parts work therapy into a piece of surrealist horror art.

The initial spark of inspiration began following a brief venture into Internal Family Systems (IFS). If you're unfamiliar with IFS or other parts work, the idea is that we literally have separate "parts" within us that have different personalities, needs, fears, etc., and these parts steer our behavior in ways that are often detrimental to our lives. The assumption in IFS is these parts are past selves that are wounded in some way, and if we tune in to them and listen to what they have to say, we can heal those wounds and begin to live our lives more fully.

If this sounds mildly insane to you, I don't disagree. I personally know people who love parts work and feel it's had a tremendously positive impact in their lives, but I don't think any of them would deny that the basic premise still sounds kind of crazy, especially when explaining it to someone else for the first time.

At the time I learned about IFS I'd been doing talk therapy with a wonderful woman for about two years (beginning in 2021 when the situation with my mouth and jaws first became complicated), and although that had been an extremely positive experience, I sometimes questioned what might come from exploring other options.

I then heard Dick Schwarz on the Rich Roll podcast talk about the creation and application of IFS and it seemed compelling to me. So I bought his book No Bad Parts and began reading it, connected with it enough to decide to go deeper, and then found someone trained in IFS to work with. The results at first were mixed for me and I felt I could see some upside to it, but by the fourth or fifth session I realized it was making me feel fucking terrible.

Like just amazingly bad.

Acknowledging that everyone has their own experiences with this sort of thing, and again, that I personally know two people who love parts work, the specific feeling I had while exploring IFS was that it was actually feeding and nourishing the negative voices in my head. For example, while practicing IFS, I would stop any time I felt self-doubt and "check-in" with the part of myself that felt that way, this sort of younger version of myself that was hurt as a child. I would check to see how "he" was feeling and what he needed in order for him to relax and allow me to take positive action in the moment.

The result was that I just felt more self-doubt.

Incidentally, I recently listened to Tony Robbins on Theo Von's podcast and they were talking about these types of negative voices in our heads and Tony expressed a sentiment that felt spot on for my experience with parts work. To paraphrase: these "parts" of us are not our friends and we shouldn't be listening to them.

As I write this a year later, I believe with absolute certainty that our lives move in the direction of our attention and that we get more of what we think about. So, as useful as it's been for me to recognize the places where I've been broken in the past, the optimal path forward from those things has been to learn how those events affected me and then retrain my mind and my emotions to think and act differently in my present circumstances. (I'm currently working through Nate Zinsser's book The Confident Mind: A Battle-Tested Guide to Unshakable Performance and have found it to be immensely valuable in this area.)

On the other hand, if I constantly pay attention to my wounded parts and accept the idea that they will always be hurting and need constant reassurance, then man, I just fucking stay trapped in a broken past forever.

And that feeling is exactly what inspired the imagery in The Tireless Lament of Past Selves.

It was easy to take the unusual premise of IFS and turn it into a sort of sci-fi horror concept, so I leaned into the idea of tormented parts of my past self living within me and harboring negative feelings about things that happened decades ago.

So the giant baby head marks the starting point of my life from which various traumas and other negative experiences stem, while the disfigured mouth of the baby symbolizes all the various problems and procedures I've had with my teeth and jaws, particularly in recent years. The other heads are more general representations of "past selves," literally pickled or preserved in jars.

The roots extending from the baby's mouth as well as the trees in the back emphasize the idea of a series of interconnected selves, my "internal family tree" of wounded selves dwelling on past mistakes, regrets, and harmful experiences.

All this, of course, is shown through a visual lens of dark fantasy surrealism informed by creative influences from comic books, metal and industrial music, and general sci-fi, fantasy, and horror media.

The Process for The Tireless Lament of Past Selves

I've talked about the penciling, inking, and color flatting processes for The Tireless Lament of Past Selves here, here, and here, respectively, but I'll re-share the finished art for each step of the process now so you can see the complete progression.

The actual color rendering for this one was fairly straightforward once I had worked out the palette I wanted, and it followed the general steps I've used on previous pieces. Once I have the "flat" colors laid out (meaning there is no shading or highlighting done yet), I select the color for each object and isolate it on its own layer in Photoshop. I then add a slight gradient to it using the orange sun/planet in the sky as a reference for the light source.

Next, I set the dodge and burn tools to a rough texture and brush over the object with each of them to give it the sort of subtle granite texture that I like. Using the lasso tool, I then select the areas of the object I want to be in shadow before dropping the lightness of the selected areas with the hue/saturation adjustment tool. I also shift the hue slightly toward a cooler color.

Once I've done this for every object in the image, I go back through and lasso out a portion of each object that I want to have an edge highlight. On a separate layer, I fill those areas with a hot orange color. I can then tinker with the opacity of the layer as well as use the eraser tool set to a soft brush and partial opacity to adjust the intensity of the highlight until it feels appropriate for each object.

One of the last steps is to change the color of the line art from black to a deep purple. I also add highlights to the line art to correspond with the light source of the planet, as well as make some areas lighter to indicate atmospheric perspective.

This last part was one of the more time-consuming elements of the color work for this one, as it involves carefully lassoing out pieces of the line art that I want to appear further away. For example, all of the lines for the trees and the bushes and the planet are a lighter color than the rest of the art so it appears they’re receding into the background.

I also pushed harder on the idea of atmospheric perspective for some of the foreground objects, specifically the jars containing the heads. As the jars become progressively smaller and move into the background, I lightened the lines and shifted the color of them to match the colors of the background.

This photo shows a lot of the variation in line color.

This work helped get me ready for finishing the color on Epistemic Machinations, which I completed after this one and by far has the most intense atmospheric perspective of any drawing I've done to date. I'll chat about the finished art for that one here in a couple months.

That's all for The Tireless Lament of Past Selves. As always, thanks for reading and I hope this blog post added some value to the artwork. If you enjoyed reading this, subscribe for email notifications and share it with a like-minded friend or family member.

Cheers until next time.

-Preston