Wednesday, December 7, 2011

Short story illustrations

 These are illustrations I did for class about a short story i wrote. Ive been working on this specific theme and story for about a year now so it was great to actually have incentive to do a series of illustrations based on it. They were all done in graphite and watercolor.

"He is the wild.  A great mane of hair, a face chiseled out a cavern of dark flickering shadows. He is a lone being existing in a forest like a sea, so large he is lost. "


"Deep in his soul he knows he was born with a plague, a parasite following him wherever he goes. He felt it to some extent, its why creatures flee from him, all that is living cowers against his presence. It is why the kings trap him in the forest, constantly flowing in a never ending current of green."



"Bounding through the woods with the grace of a doe she senses him. The imprisoned man, his own skin a cage. She can see his disease and does not understand. Everything in her body is telling her to flee from this rotting decrepit soul, but she cannot. She does not fear any being of the living world, but his presence was so twisted and thunderous she almost turned back. When she peered out on to him from between the branches the creature before her was not the beast she was expecting, he was a man, lost and helpless."


"Her freedom baffles him. He respects it more then anything. She walks in and out of his life unexpected and unchecked, her hunters never far behind. She is what he can never be, unchained and unbound, and it is on her own will that she burdens herself with him. Free will was not a force in his life, he had been doomed the day he was born. Pre existing scars just waiting to appear as the years drag on."


"The more he thinks of this freedom, the more he questions the control of his fate, the closer his parasite creeps. He wonders what it would be like to be like her, to pass in and out of these wretched woods with ease, to have control. His thoughts flicker between reality and this dream, until worlds collide and he walks in and out of is unconscious mind with ease. He is not aware that he is transforming. The specter is threatened and speaks too often now, its no longer a distant shadow but a translucent cloak. He sees through the veil no longer seeing the real, even his dreams become lies. Delusions of self control dissolve. It is pushing him inwards, a once fragile film that cannot be shattered. She brought this upon him, and now she was not there to suffocate for him. "



Fragments. Cast of characters

"His eyes snap open. And they are standing around him. Bulbous bodies hidden under curtains of dull decrepit cloth. There shoulders roll like unsteady boulders, there heads tick as there necks crack. The gluttons: Ram, Birdy, and Tell. "



"He knows what is to be done and he opens his stomach to them. They tear the flesh and suck the innards out into rotten mouths. The morbid feast through he is stitched by gluttonous hands, and he feels the emptiness. He is hungry now, starving, he has never felt such an aching in all of his days. He pines, he cries, he pleads, for the taste of torment."



"He feeds for weeks or what seems to him years. His belly growing but it can never be full. He sees the gluttons sometimes slipping in and out of the trees around him, making not a sound on the dead leaves. He does not bother with them, his anger is but a small pin prick compared to the tremendous ache beneath his stitches. She approaches, her guard is up, she sees the threads tinged a sickly green. He turns. There is nothing in his eyes, they are dark. He has become the specter, the plague is released."

This is only a small part of the story as it is not finished and is still fragmented. There are a lot of gaps in the illustrations which I plan on filling soon.  Soo yeah, enjoy.