This is about to be a compilation of work on the same topical thread.
I’ve been thinking a lot recently about Techo right at the beginning of my plot starting. Techo’s big character streak is that she’s optimistic, positive, sunshiney. But this was hard learned: first, she suffers a particularly bad breakup in February of her third year studying Philosophy.
This leads to her going back on the pull, but how do you talk to girls? Lesbians are infamous for misreading signals as platonic and she’s shy.
She finds out quickly that she’s less shy when she’s drunk, and gets onto the clubbing scene. When she’s not drunk, she’s studying and writing for her dissertation. Her days swing intensely between intense thought and drowning the intense thought.
She has too many big thoughts: about how much she misses her ex, Mist, but also (as per the philosopher’s brain) about life, morality, happiness, death, the point of things. She remembers when a friend told her half-jokingly that people that know that much can’t be happy.
As we see her character grow throughout that summer (and when she meets Ludwig, then Mitzi, then Drake, then Antonia), she pointedly challenges this statement. So this isn’t a sad story, but we have to examine the sad parts.
I begin with an illustration I did of her and Mist… I have to warn you, this is saucy. Like, don’t scroll down if there’s someone looking over your shoulder.
This was one of a few illustrations I did exploring her sexuality, but respectfully, I can’t put the others on a blog. This one is good though because it features Mist.
I then took to the ink and paper. I had an idea that I was going to draw Techo in a drunken stupor, and overlay her thinking about Mist, and have her laptop and dissertation notes in front of her too. Just trying to recreate an illustration that captures her life at the time.
I chose to do it in painted ink to create a slightly more expressive piece, and used a big brush to create a claustrophobic cloud that represents her mood, or drunkenness, however you want to read it. The plan was to overlay the colourful above image to try to drive home how that feels more colourful, vivid and real than what Techo is feeling at the desk, in the murky ink.
As I was making this illustration, Know it All by tv dinner came on shuffle. This is one of the songs I’ve had on Techo’s playlist for a while, and I thought it really suited this image – the bouncy song and absurd lyrics juxtapose the mood of the image. It also helps illustrate the other big reason Techo is drinking – her work is getting on top of her – she is wondering if there is a point to it all – etc.
But here’s the thing. I don’t want it to be read like poetry – the song is integral to how I experienced this illustration. How, said I, can I make the reader experience the song too? I can put the song over it. But how can I keep them there, before they click off after having seen the image? Ah, I can make the lyrics appear alongside the music. Will that be quite enough? I suppose if I animate the background, it might add even more to the claustrophobia and mood of the piece. And so we come to this.
What this journey has been is a marriage of process, taking things further and chance. And the video that came of it – and I will call that the final outcome – I think is successful. I think – hope – that a viewer could read from that image just about what I coded in.
SEASIDE ILLUSTRATION 