Image Description: A digital painting that looks like it was painted with messy, splotchy, textured strokes of bright orange, mustard, and yellow, as well as deep purples. It's a chest-up portrait of an Asian man, who smiles at the camera, teeth around the grip end of a fountain pen. He has a rounded face -- with a couple moles on his cheek and jaw -- and short, very straight black hair that falls loosely. The round lenses of his glasses reflect starkly the bright yellows the picture is bathed in. He has an orange ascot with a five-petal flower tie pin tucked into a dark batik shirt with various floral patterns on it. End ID.
Artist Dyed with Wax
self-portrait in the style of Disco Elysium, Prairial CCXXX, digital.
ARTIST DYED WITH WAX — Facing the coast, he looks between his canvas and the view in front of him. Humming something out of tune, he cocks his head from side to side like a hesitant animal. "There's something missing, I think."
PERCEPTION (SIGHT) — You lean over slightly to peer at what he's been painting. It's nothing like the expanse that draws out in front of the two of you. That is dreary if anything. Desaturated in everything that is. Halfhearted blues and the hadopelagic blacks of the sea.
His painting is anything but. It roars with color, bursts from its own limits. It is trying to exist beyond its own small form. Much like its artist.
CONCEPTUALIZATION (Difficult: Success) — It's the world, but it's not *the world*. Where is she? Tell him to add her, in some form or another! It's a portrait of her!
YOU — "Add Revachol. Not– not the city, duh, but *Revachol*."
ARTIST DYED WITH WAX — A smile crawls across his face, dimpling his cheeks.
EMPATHY (Medium: Success) — It may look like someone hooked two fishhooks at the corners of his mouth then pulled up, but it's genuine.
ARTIST DYED WITH WAX — "Khm, great idea! Gimme just a second."
He shuffles this way and that, dances with the brush. His movements are twitchy but precise and honed. It seems like you've only just blinked when a heart, in searing, beating red, is splotched right in the center upon the painting of the sea view. Her veins turn into leaves.
He turns to you again. "Looks much more complete. Thanks, bud."
Woah, hey mom, look, I'm in the Disco Elysium!
I have weird feelings about self portraits, but I decided to do this on impulse, and hey, turned out to be pretty fun! Something is very fun and freeing about Disco's art style. Even if it's hard to beat into my head at times that things that are messy don't necessarily look weird or 'fixable'.