Paolo & Francesca from Dante’s Inferno: depictions of the lovers reading a dirty book and falling victim to temptation, shortly before being murdered and subsequently finding themselves damned for, you know. Kissing.
If you want to see them writhing together, borne aloft on the winds of Hell, forever intertwined, well, that’s another Google image search.
I’ve realized lately that I haven’t been drawing much outside of comics and freelance work. To heck with that! If you’re going to draw for a living you need to find ways to preserve the joy, experimentation, and spontaneity inherent to the act.
At the same time, if you’re a goal-focused person like me, it’s hard to just sit down with blank paper and goof off for an hour (unless you’re on hold with tech support).
So once a week I’m going to try to doodle a character from somebody else’s work, starting with comics and maybe later branching out into prose fiction. Perhaps this can also serve as a sort of Recommended Reading list.
This week: Bottle Woman, from Order of Tales by Evan Dahm (of Rice Boy fame). Watercolor, oil pencil, colerase pencil.
What a wonderful character design! That stopper head is just brilliant, and the simplicity of her features belies a complicated and moody character. (the same could be said for Evan’s art overall!) I don’t think she’s actually green, or that her contents are blue, but it was the palette that seemed like fun.
I picked up Order of Tales at SPX on a personal mandate to Read New Things, and I can wholeheartedly recommend it as strange and absorbing. It’s rare to pick up a story that’s so immediately distinctive. A lot of people doing fantasy comics can spend a million years designing political systems and special ceremonial corsetry and researching weather patterns in an attempt to create a world so dense and realistic that a reader can immerse themselves in it, but Evan manages to suck you in with just a few brush strokes.
