Photobashing Title Art

The manga I love to read sometimes have these fancy artwork in the beginning of their chapters.
Since manga is the benchmark I look up to, I figured I made some title art for some of my chapter, whenever I got a bit of time to do so.

This particular chapter titled the name of the MC, Kasei North.

One the purpose of the chapter is to explain his background story, why he behaved the way he did.
I want to show the father in the title without drawing his face, so I resort to a bloody pin with his name on it.

The pin is CGI render created in houdini by my S.O. (a VFX wizard who shall not be named). Here's the original render:

Heres a couple more variants of it

these two shots are too zoomed in an didn't have enough space that make it work better with mobile phone vertical format, so I don't use it

I wanted this to be clear information about the chapter and not wasting too much time on it.

I think most readers read comic for the story, not staring at title art. Art matters only to a certain point for majority of readers, but beyond a certain threshold, it would be overkill to waste too much time on title art.

So I figured slap some bloods, distorted it with transform tool in photoshop to match the 3d perspective and call it a day.

Blood splatter purchased from photobash.org

It felt a bit dull... Looks a bit too Dexter, not enough fantasy elements.
Since the story is hellion related... I thought, let's toss some fire into it.

The looks bothers me. It looks like someone just got slapped things together and not really blend it in. It's the color, they're not cohesive.

So I took this rusty texture off my library, distorted it with perspective transform tool to the white area of the image and overlay it, also use some photo filter to blend things in. Then add some sparks to the fire.

Feels better than that sterile Dexter one up there

Now the image pleases my eyeballs, I'm happy to call it a day. DONE! (─‿─)

The R-18+ CGI elements that will show up throughout all my comic from now on, also all created by my S.O. in houdini.

I stick to R-18+ instead of making my comic G-rated (which is usually easier to digest and probably woud've gotten more popular) is because of the grayscale morality and a few questionable behavior by the MC in this series.

All these things are open to interpretation by the readers, instead of me presenting a clear cut black and white events, which is usually found in the children friendly reading materials.