Illustration Notes for Episode Thirty-Eight
There are a LOT of moving parts, suddenly, in both this story, and in my and my wife’s lives. I have been scrambling this week to finish writing and illustrating, not one, but THREE new episodes of TWICE, because next Monday, Shannon and I are headed for her stepfather’s memorial service in California, which—for logistical reasons I won’t bother explaining here—we must drive to. …Kind of an eleven-day driving tour of virtually all the current coronavirus hot spots on the West Coast. We’ll be wearing latex gloves whenever we aren’t in the car.
This lengthy trip also means I will be scheduling the next two episodes of TWICE to go out automatically while I am out of state frantically tending to other things—which means they must all be done before we leave—on Monday.
And TWICE, remember, is just a personal project that I normally fit in around the edges of all my more mandatory work—two weeks of which also had to be completed this week. …So, if any of the next three illustrations looks a little more rushed than usual—now you know why. :D
All that said, this week’s image provided me with an interesting moment! In art—as in writing—one’s ‘creation’ sometimes suddenly finds a voice of its own, and speaks up—loudly—to propose some much better plan than the one the ‘creator’ is following. This week’s image was one of those.
Once again, I found myself depicting a ‘conversation’ between three characters—and trying to make the image ‘pretty’ at least—by depicting The Lady’s house in the woods again—from closer up—and just putting my three conversing characters in one of its little windows. So I spent a day creating a lovely image of this great building in this cool forest, and, finally, got started on the task of inserting tiny images of my three characters into its nearest room. I started with The Lady, and just as I was finishing her up, and preparing to insert Rain and Piper there beside her, my illustration stuck a hand in my face, and said, “Hey! Dummy! LOOK at what you got here before you screw it up!”
So, I set my stylus down, and looked. At that straight-backed, chin-up woman, standing—stoic and ALONE—behind the widows of her refuge…as the world she’s trying to preserve teeters ever more precariously ‘outside’… and understood that my picture’s voice was correct! I was done!
Putting Rain and Piper in that room with her would just have made this image a depiction of things you already knew: ‘three people had a conversation in The Lady’s woodland mansion.’ Not bad, if that’s all I got. But leaving the other two characters OUT of this image turned it into a depiction of something you had NOT already read: a moment AFTER this episode ends, when The Lady is left, alone, to absorb, ponder and brace herself for this event, and all it may bring about. A much more powerful image, that ADDS something to the story already told, rather than just reiterating it—which I would just have blundered past had my picture not spoken up and made me pay attention. Thanks, Mr. Picture!
Of course, once I realized that this image should be about The Lady left alone behind that window, I needed that window—and her—to be much bigger, and more central than it had been when it was just a ‘detail’ in some larger image of the house. So, I had to enlarge the image and crop out a lot of other stuff I’d already drawn around that window. …Maybe not a big time saver, after all—but a better image. And that’s the real point, no?
As always, you will find an uncropped and uncluttered version to peruse below. :] Enjoy.
