Endgames

A drawing made on my flight to Honolulu for ICCV.

---

This started off as a revamp of the cover of my comic "Endgames." The comic features a couple, Luke (a child math prodigy) and Marina (a middle-of-the-pack chess grandmaster), who play chess at the end of the world. The chess game symbolizes the turbulent dynamics of their relationship and the apocalypse befelling them. I at least think the premise is interesting, but the finished comic fell short of my expectations because I think I prioritized crafting the overall atmosphere over a substantial storyline. The premise is still kicking around in my sketchbook, and I'm feebly hoping that a concrete story will emerge if I draw these two frequently enough. This worked for Hayao Miyazaki, at least?

Eventually, I got stunlocked into drawing Marina's face and realized that the zoomed in version had a much better composition.

As a side note, it's always difficult for me figure out why some illustrations look more appealing than others. In this case, if I had to put it in words, I think the chessboard in the original was too high-contrast compared to the rest of the illustration, washing the subjects out. I think if I diluted the values of the chessboard, this original composition might have worked out. This is also why I often think my sketches look better than the colored versions; there's much more than can go wrong when dealing with 3 color channels instead of 1.

Thus, I ignored the advice of my old art teacher 方老师 and started only focusing on that small bit of the illustration that I liked, and this is what came out. I guess you have to know the rules to break them ;)

The angels were an afterthought, and I still don't know exactly what compelled me to draw them. One idea that I came up with post hoc is that they are manifestations of Luke's love for Marina, pedestalizing her into a god-queen-like figure to which he feels utterly inferior to. Another idea is that the angels are Christian monarchs trying to ascend to heaven, only to realize their God is a woman who takes the form of their respective spouses. They have to garner approval from this God in order to enter heaven, yet we all know that the way some of these men from the past treated their wives may have precluded them from achieving eternal bliss.

references:

Being on a plane constrained me to these two refs because of airplane mode. Nice to force yourself into not scrolling online illustration eye candy.