I'm getting very close to a final art style for Izabel and I'd like to discuss it. The whole project has an interesting relationship with the art world as a whole, so this is leading me towards a more traditional approach. Originally I started with an anime approach and there is a good reason for that. And that has to do with what Izabel is as a whole.
The image below is the latest drawing of Izabel and these will be the facial features I stick to for her from now on. This image comes from collectible items in the game which are pages from Mother's Sketchbook. Izabel's mother is a wealthy painter, and she actually feels compelled to draw things that occur in the mansion. She essentially has no choice but to make art, and that's a weakness you'll get to exploit eventually. With each one of these pages you'll also get to read a journal entry where her mother talks about the subject in the drawing.
I'm sure many artists feel the same way. They have to draw things they sometimes wish they didn't. I think it would be awesome for me if I loved to draw the things people love to see. Like if I drew more fan art or more sexy women, instead I draw things like cannibalism and people without eyes, even as a child my art was hardcore and I couldn't say
"hey granny put this on the fridge", but sometimes I wish I could've.
Izabel
Izabel is based on my natural tendencies when making art. You've probably noticed at this point that I draw a lot of conservative-looking women. There's actually a very specific woman with very specific features I've been trying to draw. As far as I know this woman doesn't exist. But if she did exist, I'm not saying I don't have any ideas of who she might be, I do have a few individuals in mind, I'm not that crazy. It's also possible that she represents my interpretation of ultimate beauty which could be my subconscious idolizing positive relationships in the past with people who have similar features. Izabel is meant to be that woman or at least she looks like her.
What I mean to say is this is the woman my subconscious wants to draw. If I were given the opportunity to draw anything with no real guidelines, I would naturally end up producing an image of this person. Again, I couldn't say exactly why. I could just be weirdo, or there could be things going on in my subconscious that would be obvious to any therapist.
This image above is from 2016 and it's possibly the first time I attempted to draw this imaginary person. And this got me interested in drawing people who don't exist as if they do. You may notice some similarities in their features. The wavy hair, the smooth face. You'll probably see it more in an earlier drawing of Izabel. This next image below is sort of like the mission statement of the project which makes it extremely important to me. The emotions evoked in this image should be echoed throughout the entire game.
I'm not sure exactly at what point black hands came into the design. I found them to be a very effective way of displaying emotions. Months after I started this I learned those emotions are related to Social Anxiety Disorder. In many ways I feel like this could be a meme template that says "this is what social anxiety feels like". As a child I didn't know that I had Social Anxiety Disorder, and now that my mother is a Special Ed Teacher, she can pretty easily identify some of the core signs. Because I didn't know about it, I had to live my life as if I didn't have it. Always living up to the expectations of people who don't have social anxiety and hating myself for not being able to do it. So in this picture we actually see Izabel looking at these monsters as though they aren't a problem, and even holding hands with one of them.
So looking back at the style again. Izabel started with an anime theme because anime art comes naturally to me. Anime art is how I got started so it will always have a place in my heart. It has a very important relationship with my childhood. But I found a traditional approach was much stronger. These are all digital paintings, but I do enjoy giving them the feel of traditional media, since that's what I'm known for. Especially my work with colored pencils.
This next image is the first drawing of Hilda, a blind maid who you're meant to face. Originally I considered the hands to be a representation of the way she interacts with the world by touch. Mother makes it apparent that her eyes were removed because she saw paintings that Mother wanted to keep hidden. These are actually some of the first paintings you see. Which means you end up on mother's bad side very early-on.
This is another page from Mother's Sketchbook. One of the reasons why I like this style is because it adds character to Izabel's mother as an artist. We're meant to believe that her mother made every drawing in the mansion. The drama of the monochromatic drawings is something I really liked about the original anime works that I've been using in the current style. By using a such a traditional style, I think, shows how prideful she is. Interestingly enough, Izabel's mother actually deals with same issues as Izabel, which is why she mentions being hungry.
Izabel and the Cage (in progress)
The entire project was originally called "The Cannibal". Which comes from a book I wrote while I was in elementary school also called "The Cannibal" about a little girl who is born with a disorder that requires her to exclusively eat people in order to survive. So you could consider it similar to Tokyo Ghoul. I actually don't have any copies of the original text although it's not very interesting to read because it was written by a child. Looking back there were some core themes that I found very interesting or at least unusual for a child to write about.
The story starts off with the little girl's parents arguing about how they're going to euthanize her because providing her food is completely unrealistic. In that moment the little girl had already been starving for weeks and when she approaches them after hearing them argue, and a combination of her predatory instincts taking over, a feeling of anger at her parents, and a supernatural voice urging her to eat, she decides to eat and kill both of her parents with some kind of supernatural strength. She also much later on uses their skulls (and spirits in theory) as magical weapons which insinuate that they still love her and she still loves them. So there is a theme of being betrayed by her parents, forgiveness, feeling broken, and the need to destroy others in order to sustain yourself.
One thing that makes Izabel complicated is that there are two different art styles that have to work together. There's the actual art inside the mansion and then there is the way the game engine renders the mansion which is also heavily stylized. Which is different in Blade Regalia where the rendering in the game is meant to mirror the art style. Rendering in Izabel is meant to highlight the importance of light and shadow regarding game mechanics. Light itself is actually a very core element of the game.
Some comments I've had were that the flat, cel-shaded objects provide an interesting sense of artificiality and an unnatural mood when adjacent to naturally rendered objects. Some people have told me it was more interesting to have the house naturally shaded with the hands cel shaded because it made the monsters feel more otherworldly.
This is the same effect I hope to maintain with the natural paintings in an unnatural world. Some of the drawings in the mansion are actually real oil paintings that were photographed. However, my favorite drawings would be like the one below which indicate mother's painting compulsion in real time, and that she already knows you've been sneaking around and had time to paint, frame, and hang it up on the wall for you to see. These paintings are done by using a projector to project he game onto a canvas and trace each color.
In some ways this relates to the incredible difference in power between parents and children. I'm sure many of us as children can recall being outsmarted by our parents or by other adults. It's very humbling.
Topic: Kesashi's Gallery (Read 124930 times)
