Completely Your Fault

Okay, unlike the last post this might require a bit of explanation. So since I got my English credit out of the way in high school I'm taking a course about concepts of Hell in western literature this semester. The course started a few days ago, and while I was waiting for the professor to arrive, I drew some shadowy figures. These figures are based on an idea I have for drawing the unsubstantial ghosts from Hell in C.S. Lewis' book The Great Divorce. (You may have noticed I've been drawing a lot from C.S. Lewis lately, but that's because focusing on familiar experiences often eases times of transition.) These figures were also an experiment in communicating a human shape with as little lines as possible. Then I added a bunch of random, fiery lines to distort them. After the class my head was so full of vague uncertainty and cautious hope that I decided to draw the characters Ford and Rick fighting with the ghost figures to balance my brain out. I finished it today. So still nothing incredibly original, but it's something.

I drew Rick's head too big in proportion to his body. It's a common error of mine. Ford also looks slightly off somehow, but I think I'll have to re-draw him to figure out what. I drew the topmost, rightmost, and bottom-left ghosts first, and I like them the best of the five. Ford is the one saying that this is completely Rick's fault. To which Rick responds with something like "Yeah, put it on the list."

Maybe I'll try to do something different next time. For a minute it looked like I would have too little energy to draw this like I said I would. I'm thankful I ended up doing it. Thank you God for today and for this drawing.

Cartoon Sky

I warned you abstract stars featured heavily in my doodling. This drawing was done not only one week before today, but also the first full day of college for me. I had some time before a test and I didn't want to do anything too elaborate, so I drew this when it popped up in my head. It's practice drawing cartoon stars and clouds, which I think I need more of. I like this picture better in color. In my head, the clouds are pink and the sky goes from light blue at the top to dark blue at the bottom. I thought I'd share it today since I have time.

Your Affectionate Uncle

Tonight I was listening to The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis, and I took it upon myself to create a rough character design for the titular character. For those of you who don't know, The Screwtape Letters is written from the perspective of an arch-devil giving advice to his nephew. It's a fantastic literary device for a great book. You should read it.

I have seen many illustrations of Screwtape, but none of them satisfied me. They were neither arrogant nor frightening enough. So I drew a bunch of concepts till I had something I was somewhat happy with. There would be a lot more design decisions to make, but I wanted to do this now while I could. I'm doing something a little different. Because I'm in college now I don't have easy access to a printer, so instead I took a photo of this page with my phone. I have no idea how this will work in the future for things like animatics. Right now all I can do is take college three days at a time when I want to be taking it one day at a time. God have mercy on us all.

Shelved Discussion

My second original animatic! The story and script for this one has been finished for quite a while, but I only just drew all the frames this week because I wanted to get in one more animatic before college. This is also my first animatic that I've done in my own (heavily influenced) style rather than Gravity Falls style. The last animatic got a lot of in-person comments from different people about how "smart" it was. One person even compared it to the independent film "Primer," which was not my intention. I like smart stories, and I like making smart stories. That was kind of the point of Tachy's Time Pizza. However, I wanted to do something more relatable for this animatic. So just as a reminder, Bookends is a story idea I had about made-up sentient books. One is Classic Children's Fairytales, another is 1983 (my parody name for the George Orwell's dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four), and the third is The Great Journey. Their character design and personality are based on what kind of books they each are. You may have been wondering why they were sleeping on shelves. Now you know.

This time I actually drew the frames from start to finish, then went back and filled in more. In other words, I didn't draw the beginning and end frames first, so there is a little change in dimensions overtime. Usually I don't make that mistake, but it's something for me to learn from next time. I simplified the shapes and lines early on. It was fun to take a character I had designed in detail and figure out how to storyboard them properly. There are a lot of amateur mistakes as well as flaws that just arise out of the scanned paper format I'm using, but I'm really glad I did this. Thank you so much God for helping me to finish this. I had a lot of fun. Your will be done.