Illustration Notes for Episode Nineteen
This week’s illustration was kind of a challenge, conceptually. The things happening in this episode happen mostly inside Anna or in exchanges between herself and others. Not a lot of ‘action’ or ‘atmospheric’ things to riff on. Just a normally active, dynamic woman dealing with the frustration of being alone with nothing to do while everything “important” is happening elsewhere.
And then it occurred to me that that’s what this episode is actually about! A still moment—and Anna herself, as much as anything else, at the ‘calm’ eye of a storm, reflecting on a lot of ‘floating pieces’ and dealing ‘remotely’ with disparate troubles happening in the storm wall all around her. But...I’m trying to avoid portrait illustrations these days—for reasons explained in previous illustration notes—and thus didn’t want to do a portrait of Anna herself. So, instead of a look at her, how about a look at what she’s seeing?
Among other things, this episode of TWICE is a pacing device—a moment of contrasting calm and quiet deliberately set in the middle of all the disaster and action adventure to either side of it. A ‘beat’ in the music, to inhale, as it were. So that’s what I’ve tried to draw here: the warm, dry, tensely-quiet ‘eye of the storm’—as Anna might see it sitting on the couch in her living room. The stack of Matt’s pages she’s not gotten to all day, the anniversary gift, unwrapped and left sitting there as other events swamped and sidelined that celebration—again, the phone—silent now, but pregnant with the possibility of troubling news at any moment. And, of course, the TV remote and the television newscast; its ultramarine blues and cardinal reds visually discordant with everything else in the warmly yellow-orange room—just as the newscast itself is the one clearly jarring element in Anna’s immediate environment when this episode begins.
It’s all there: a brief, warm, quiet pause ready to be shattered by all the breathless adventure around it.
Or, at least, that’s what I was trying for. :]
As always, you’ll find an uncropped version of this week’s image below. Enjoy. :]
