Every now and then I'll do this crazy
posting thing. It's crossposted to my journal and I can't ever post images on here, so instead you get links. When you see "click me!" you do that and you get a fresh burst of artwork.
It's a project that people keep coming up to me and asking about, and although it usually gets referred to as "That thing about the tumour that you did", it is entitled Onter after an imaginary friend I had when I was little.
The brief we were given was to create a story that summed up a proverb or saying. I chose the term "two-faced" from the list we were given. I'd been thinking for a little while about a kind of tumour called a teratoma. If you don't know what it is, click here and I'll go on to explain that some become rather human. Some have skin and hair, some have teeth, some have blood, pulses and muscles, reactions, reflexes, and some even have voices. I didn't make any of that up, it's true, if you do enough research you'll see for yourselves.
So enter Orville.
Click me
Orville is agoraphobic and obsessed with his own appearance in a rather sick way. He's morbidly obese, the cause of his agoraphobia, and he feeds that insecurity by posing in front of the mirror each day. It's a ritual for him, he inspects himself in a variety of different poses. One day he notices a bump.
The reason I had it form on his belly was because that was the center of his insecurity. I don't think a teratoma would normally form there. As it grows, he becomes more interested in it than himself; he's found a friend that doesn't have to be human. The only problem is that his "friend" is killing him. It gains more and more human attributes, and now jumping a little further into the surreal, primitive emotions too. Specifically, the tumour(named Onter) and Orville become attached to one another. Orville nurses it, and feels better about himself all the time, despite his constant weakness and impending death that he turns a blind eye to.
Click me
On certain pages of the story(these are only select frames that I made for the final presentation), I wanted Onter's development to be documented independant of the evidence of a host or environment. I wanted to show it as a creature in it's own right as well as a parasite.
Click me
Above is an image from a relatively early stage in the full life of Onter. I tried to make it baby-like; immobile, helpless, even the blue background something fairly infantile(although that aspect of it may have been lost a bit in scanning). Below is a much later stage in development, where it becomes more dominant and powerful, and I decided to make it dinosaur-like, and try to do the name "monster cancer" justice:
Click me
Eventually, Onter becomes capable of sustaining itself, and takes the opportunity in Orville's sleep to detach itself.
Click me
Although Orville dies, before he does so he comes to understand that Onter is concerned with consuming him and doesn't care for him in the same way that he cares for it; with this I'm trying to sum up the term "two-faced"- a person who'll take you over and ruin you but make you feel good in your ignorance at the same time, but get a bit of distance and with that you'll gain perspective.
Ink's something I'm still getting used to, and although the work was kind of shoddy I still felt pleased with it. I was happy with the way the colours came out and the look of the tumour more than anything else, and overall it was a pretty successful project.
Disgusted?
Onter the Teratoma - several images
Which hopefully thanks to this project I'll get on the illustration course next year.
