A little over a week ago I decided I wanted to try stenciling, and spent an evening flipping through my old sketchbooks trying to find an image that was thought out enough that I'd be able to re-draw it digitally and vectorize it instead of starting from scratch and having to spend even longer figuring out the light/dark details. Early on the original drawing (not pictured) popped into mind. It then took me 30-60 minutes to find which sketchbook it was in, since I couldn't remember what year it was originally done (SP06), or where over half of my sketchbooks were (garage in a filing cabinet). I spent about a day re-drawing, polishing and vectorizing the original into the above. Then I got some feedback from some friends, most of which liked it, but changed it to below when two friends had very strong opinions about not liking the simplistic background.
This became the final design when I realized the bullet holes looked better as snow, and that the black background was more dramatic. As you can see two sheets were used: 1 for the guy, and 1 for the snow/breath. Here's the first printing of the stencil on 25lb. normal printer paper--something I will never use again, it barely avoided melting when it got wet. The slipping of the registration was actually caused by the whole issue with the paper nearly melting.
