Monthly Archive for March, 2007

Evil is harder than it looks.

Well, good, semi-original evil is hard anyway. I’ve never had a knack for creating purely evil characters (alla Pinhead). Twisted, perverted and disturbing are all in my artistic vocabulary, but for whatever reason, pure, gothic, unrelenting evil has always been a struggle.

I think it has something to do with the fact that I don’t think it exists. No one is purely anything. Every Hitler has his artistic past and every Saint has their controversy. Regardless of the reason, I’ve always sucked at it and preferred the company of cartoons.

Well, Dominance War arrived again this year and I simply can’t stomach fighting for anyone but Polycount. Polycount is always evil. Just plain evil. So, just as last year, my friend/colleague Geoff and I decided to team up, despite crunch mode going on at work. I concept. He models.

You can check out our unfinished entry from last year here. General Twinkles is further proof of my inability to cope with evil maturely. So, this year Geoff requested that I do something really evil. Though it wasn’t as appealing as a pink bunny, I thought I’d really dig deep into my dark side and give it a go.

What follows is a winding road full of failures that I’d like to share:

Our first idea was to play off a recent movie called Black Snake Moan starring the honorable Samuel L. Jackson.

The flic was dookie at best (but still entertaining like Snakes on a Plane), we couldn’t get past this idea of Sam chaining up a woman:

Obviously, that isn’t evil enough. We still liked the idea of a big thing chained to a small thing, but as usual, I got engrossed in the funny Sam Jackson part of it. So, we developed it bit and thought about a big blind tough guy, small girl/boy. The child searches out the victim, jumps on and tags the prey with saliva. The big blind guy has a strong sense of smell and sniffs out the saliva on the target and wreaks havoc.

I started getting this image of “rednecks from hell” kinda thing in my head. But, it all seemed a bit cliché and still lacking the evil.

I kept pushing the evil but nothing felt quite right and it all looked lack luster to me. I felt like it was getting dark, but not interesting. Geoff wasn’t quite feeling it either.

I posted some of these up at Brackenwood to get a grip on what was working and what wasn’t. Elephant suggested making the big thing a woman to keep it from going too cliché. This started me on another path.

Geoff and I threw ideas back and forth until we reached the Shadow Mother.

Our character is now an assassin, like an undead mother. She appears relatively normal aside from undulating baby parts underneath her skin (not drawn yet). Her attack is fairly simple; she unleashes her Shadow Children on the victim, whom devour the poor soul.

It still needs allot of work and research, but I feel better about this idea than any of the previous. The deadline is looming with little time to refine this idea due to work obligations (as usual), but we plan to finish it regardless, even if it’s too late for the contest.