FEATURED WORK
Lilacs and Lamb's-Ears
My biggest goal when making art and designing characters is to create things that inspire people to feel a connection to those scenes and characters. This piece and this character are ones that I have felt such a connection to in my own work over the past few years.
Ira, the character featured in this illustration, is a part of a collaborative role-playing game I have been involved in with my close friends since late 2018. Ira has been a mystery throughout the unfolding of the game’s story, beginning as the anonymous note-leaving childhood friend of my own character, and slowly coming out of the shadows (both literally and figuratively) through our narrative choices. It became a bit of a game over the weeks and months for me to try and guess who they were and what they looked like, as I began the game with next to no information of the sort. The conspiracy board of collected details inspired more design attempts than I could feasibly count, and each appearance of him in the story gave me a new direction for the illustrations.
The secretive and caring nature of Ira’s character is what eventually gave me the idea for the illustration back in early 2020. I spent months working on and revisiting this specific piece, making tweaks to Ira’s design and the visual elements of the illustration each time I uncovered something new about them in our story. Ira’s personality is heavily tied to their secrecy and love of symbolism in literature, notably with birds and floriography, so I was determined to incorporate both into the piece. The bouquet of lilacs (symbol of new love) and lamb’s-ears (symbol of support) was one given as a gift by my own character, and it obscures most of his face as he smells the flowers. I wanted to convey a feeling of being immersed in the flowers with him holding the bouquet to his face as it starts to spill out of his arms while he is distracted by the feeling. The bouquet unintentionally hides his face from view as a way to tie in his mysterious and secretive habits. The original composition included more floral elements as well as an enlarged version of one of the letters they had written, which can be seen below in the small gallery of progress shots and iterations of this piece. I may go back and add in again someday.
I still get the urge to go back to this illustration from time to time, and although I now know much more about this character than I did even when drawing the most recent iteration of this piece, I don’t doubt there will someday be another updated version to share.
Tools: Paint Tool SAI.
