Illustration Notes for Episode Eleven

When I closed my eyes to envision this week’s illustration, what I saw immediately was the face Matt sees upon waking—for the second time—on the morning after his transformative ordeal in that alleyway.

So, I went down to our VERY friendly neighborhood fire station in hopes of photographing an actual paramedic, just as Matt would have opened his eyes to see him. Local hero, Nick Kiniski, literally minutes after returning from an actual emergency call on the streets of Eastsound, agreed to step before my camera! My thanks to Nick, and all the other cheerfully helpful people at our firehouse—for this favor, and everything else they do for us here! :]

As I began work on this week’s illustration, I turned the image on its side to better capture the ‘spatial disorientation’ Matt might have felt upon waking. Then, as I began to ‘paint’ the actual illustration on my Cintiq, I grew infatuated with the beautiful sense of sunny, blue morning light emerging as I worked. All the lovely colors in the figure’s face and white shirt! What a great opportunity to focus on ‘non-local color,’ (an ‘artistic’ term referring to all the reflected and constituent colors visible on and in objects other than their ‘official’ basic color). There was hardly a shred of true, pure ‘white’ anywhere in his ‘white’ shirt—or almost any actual Caucasian ‘flesh tone’ in his face. And yet—they read as white and ‘flesh-toned,’ no? I spent two days very enjoyably getting all the wonderful color and light in this piece just right—before remembering that this image illustrates one of the ‘Matt’s Tale’ episodes—which, as I explained in my notes for Episode Nine, I’ve decided to make ‘sepia-toned’ with the text of Matt’s bizarre ‘document’ superimposed across them, to help distinguish Matt’s ‘past tense’ tale from episodes of the ‘current time’ story lines.

Sepia-toned.

Which meant I’d worked up all that lovely color and light for NADA! (Sigh…) I am getting more and more scatterbrained these days.

SO, I got up the next morning and wiped out all that pretty work. But I still enjoyed making the full color image—a lot—and you can see uncropped versions of BOTH the original color illustration and the sepia-toned version. Enjoy! :]