This is a study of the LIFE screen/texture from artist Ville Callio's game, Cruelty Squad. LIFE, stylized in all caps or just capitalized, seems to be a cryptic element within CruS. It seems (to me) to be distinct from "life" as a general word, possibly representing a specific form or quantification of "life" in, knowing the game's themes, some kind of financial or gnostic context. It most prominently features in the first secret ending of the game, where the player must get the surgery that replaces their Life meter with a Death meter. This allows them to wall jump and not receive damage from radioactive clouds, for some reason. The radiation immunity is necessary to bypass a huge radioactive tunnel into the secret area of the HQ map in the game, itself only accessible behind a door that only opens if you're cursed. Entering the level while cursed will instantly and permanently kill any of the remaining friendly named NPCs in the HQ. Once you get through the gauntlet in the backrooms of the HQ, you're armed with an SKS rifle that magically scales its damage off your holdings in the stock market. If your holdings are high enough, you'll be able to destroy the man guarding the exit- a strange, lumpy man wielding a DNA Scrambler pistol and wearing a mask emblazoned with "LIFE". On his death, the door behind him reveals a wall with the LIFE face on it, and approaching plays the ending where the face talks to you while distorting in unusual ways. As far as I can tell, its monologue essentially amounts to "all of the people that liked you are dead and it's your fault because you stood on their necks to begin ascending to literal corporate godhood." That's (probably) why entering the level cursed instantly kills all of the named NPCs, given that they're all abundantly kind to the player. It's a way to force ensure their deaths via player action assuming the player hasn't already murdered them in a fit of ennui. Or, like, it could all just be meaningless bullshit. Ville himself has said that everything in CruS is just nonsense. I don't personally believe him- a lot of it has interesting correlations that don't feel very coincidental- but he could be laughing at me.
The LIFE texture also appears on the computer monitor of the one unique target in Neuron Activator. I have no fucking idea why. The LIFE face seems to be a cryptic secret within the Cruelty Squad setting, so I have no idea why the biggest dipshit in the game would know about it. Maybe it's just appearing to the player because the player's acts in Neuron Activator are some kind of redemption? That's probably fucking stupid of me. Whatever.
Anyway, I'd like to be up front and to say that I didn't put much effort into the construction on this painting. I did a little bit of pencil tracing out of the main shapes in the image- the curve of the mouth, dots to correspond to the number of teeth, symmetrical scribbles to denote the eye placement. This sketch was mainly meant to be an attempt to grasp how Ville builds color in his paintings, as well as just some fun with the symmetry tool. A lot of people in recent years have developed a very stupid knee jerk reaction to the word "tracing"- several major tracing scandals left them with the impression that any tracing ever is immediately deeply sinful. This is not the case. Tracing is a great tool for learning! As long as you're not trying to pass off traced work as your own, or doing major tracing for paid commission work, you're fine. In this case, I did it as a shortcut through construction because I wanted to spend the afternoon messing with color. More than anything, it's just important to be transparent about when you're doing it.
This is the original texture, by the way.