Friday, March 29, 2013

Shattered World

Hey folks,

Here are two pieces I've done recently. The first was the second in a set of 4-colour process screenprints I did based on the China Meiville book, Rail Sea. A world I found particularly intriguing. The prints ended up being a 5-colour process: all of the white mist figures ended up as a fifth "ghost layer" in which the ink base was mixed with a bit of white and ultramarine. When using UV-based inks, the transparency is such that the ghosts come out very subtly. I'm super happy with the way they came out on this one.



It seems very funny, to me, that the post after I go on a rant about skimpy female character design, I post this. An original character by me, female, and wearing almost no clothing. But before I'm accused of being a hypocrite, the reasoning behind the nudity present here is not appeal to any kind of male sex-fantasy in the same way that characters like the ones present in League of Legends can be construed as. Allow me to elaborate the process behind this piece.

This piece will go on to be another artifact of my ongoing set of prints exploring this ruined world present in my last two "Railship" pieces, but that's not the origin of this drawing. As some of you know, I run a creature design competition on ConceptArt.org called Creature of the Week, wherein competitors are given a prompt from which they must design a creature. ConceptArt.org is also home to Evironment of Week, Industrial Design of the Week, Panel of the Week and Character of the Week. A recent Character of the Week prompt was "Mary Worth" (AKA "Bloody Mary") and their brief history of the character introduced her as being a normal, decent person until an accident disfigured her. She was told not to look in the mirror to spare her the horror, but did anyway driving her to madness and spawning the vengeful version that appears when her name is said thrice while looking the mirror. Now the prompt given specified that the piece could be set in "any time period", so that got me wondering: "What could have possibly driven Mary to insanity about her face". I came to the conclusion that she might lose her humanity if she discovered she'd never had any to begin with. What if she was an android with the firm belief that she was a human. Other entries wanted to capture the sadistic rage of Bloody Mary, but I wanted to show the more tragic side of the character. That's why she's depicted as such, I wanted to depict her in a vulnerable state, with all revealed, such that it could truly be seen the degree to which she is not human. I guess its up to you whether you feel that justifies my potential hypocrisy but I felt I should explain my logic there, at least.