Illustration Notes for Episode Twenty-Five

This week, I’d like to talk a bit about the emerging challenges of committing to a several-year-long schedule of weekly art deadlines for a largely unpaid personal creative project. Because those challenges are becoming clearer to me than they were when I made the hare-brained decision to do this serial. :] So, come laugh along with me for a moment.

The first challenge is, of course, TIME. ‘Well, duh!’ you say?

Artists rather famously ‘have no head for practical concerns like organization or money,’ and I’m…well, the poster child for this disorder. When I was ‘planning’ this project, a “whole week” seemed like plenty of time to turn out one illustration now that I’m ‘semi-retired’—especially if I kept the art style loose and sloppy, and settled most of the time for fairly simple scenes or vignettes. …But it turns out—giant surprise!—that my illustrations have never tended to be very ‘simple, loose or sloppy’ because I don’t really do ‘simple or sloppy’ very comfortably, or very well. My head is always full of more ’ambitious’ ideas—which I can’t seem to simplify very naturally.

And then there’s my comically obvious miscalculation in imagining I’d ever have “a whole week” to turn out any of these images. Like maybe nothing else would ever come up that needed doing—more than three or four times a day.

It’s as if I’d never really met myself before. Artists! God preserve us.

Turns out, there are going to be weeks—like this one, containing Thanksgiving, and my birthday, a delightful extended visit from my mother, and a sudden swarm of other urgent ‘holiday season’ and ‘home maintenance’ tasks—when I never find any time to whip out a suitable illustration from scratch. Who knew?

But a second, less anticipated challenge has come up as well—the difficulty of finding models for all the important recurring characters in this story, here in the small community on my new island home.

So far, this tale revolves mostly around four characters of ‘our kind,’ and four characters of ‘the other kind.’ But within the next few months, this story is going to involve literally dozens of additional significant characters—not counting a rumbling herd of minor but vivid cameo roles! Drawing characters that only ever appear once or twice is no problem. I can draw them any way I want, and that’s the end of it. But for characters that will be appearing over and over—in all sorts of poses at all sorts of angles in all sorts of light—I need a model to photograph and draw from. Otherwise my ‘adequate’ figure rendering skills will produce decent looking figures in each illustration—that look nothing like the same person I drew last time. There are people out there who can conceive of and reproduce a figure of specific height, build, bone and facial structure—from any angle in any pose and any light—just from memory and imagination. I am not one of them. I have no problem imagining whole compositions, landscape, figures, color and lighting schemes, instantly in my mind. But I need to see and reproduce the details of what I am drawing from some external, objective reference, or my sense of those details just keeps revolving and morphing as I attempt to capture it on the page.

In other places I have lived, I knew, and was known by, large communities of people, whom I could go to for ‘modeling help’ in situations like this. But Orcas Island has a much smaller pool of people to choose from than, say, Seattle or Portland did, and having only lived here a short time yet, Shannon and I don’t know most of them yet—at all. Combine this with the fact that half of my ‘several dozen significant recurring characters’ are teenage in fact or appearance, and you may begin to see the problem. Strange new guy cannot just wander around his new island home asking to ‘photograph random peoples kids for a fantasy serial he’s working on.’ Not given the unsettled world we live in these days.

I’ve been asked to help the library here plan their summer reading program—which involves working with both the children’s and the teen librarians—both very enjoyable people. I have also been asked to participate in an art mentoring program for kids at The Fun House, a marvelous youth-activities hangout and activity center here on Orcas. Being sociable people, Shannon and I are making new friends all the time. Within a year or so, I may know and be known by enough people here well enough to start asking more easily after modeling help from some of their kids. But right now…

I am profoundly grateful to have found a model for the teenage character of Matthew Rhymer, but I’ve still found no models for the equally ‘teenage-seeming’ Piper, or even for the ‘collegiate-looking ’ character of Rain—both of whom might already have been very useful for alternative illustrations in recent episodes. By February or March there will be over a dozen ‘teenage’ characters to depict—at a distance, at least. I am uncomfortable just inventing some entirely ‘made up’ character yet—even at a distance, in shadow and turned away from the viewer, as I did with Rain and Piper for the Episode 17 image—for fear of finding a good model in the next few months who turns out to bear no resemblance to what I’ve already drawn.

It is—to quote an old Broadway musical—‘a puzzlement.’ And not one I gave any thought to when I blithely set out on this adventure last June.

So…while I think this week’s image does a great job of evoking Matt’s plunge into the city’s underground labyrinth—even without depicting any figures—it is not actually MY artwork at all, really. As with the footer image from Episode 22 a few weeks ago—this image is another ‘stylistically re-painted,’ but otherwise basically unaltered ‘stock photo’—seemingly a pretty well known and well used one. Nonetheless, when I did a ‘reverse image’ search on it—both at the stock-photo site where I purchased the rights to use it, and on Google images in general, I was not able to find a clue—anywhere—about who the photographer was. If any of you happens to find out, please let me know, and I will happily credit her/him/them! :]

For now, as with Episode 22, I have attached below both the uncropped and uncluttered ‘repaint’ and the stock photo I started with, for your perusal. :]