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Collaborator — Description

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I am adding another aspiration to my long list of "it would be great to good at..." This time it is writing.

This is a illustration I did for my depute short story published in Estonian sci-fi magazine. The story is called "Collaborator". (if you can read Estonian, here is the link www.ulmeajakiri.ee/?jutt-kolla… ) Basically, the illustration is about the final scene of the story.

I think I was around 7-8, when I fell in love with books as stories. I was hardly able to read properly (and we were asked to read children books at school), when I got my hands on antique copy of "Mysterious Island" by Jules Verne. I have no idea how I convinced my parents to "borrow" this old book and I spent hours sitting and trying to read typed letters (at school we were reading at capital letters at the time). It was huge book - so it took my enormous amount of time to go through it but it was brilliant (and I learned to read very fast when I managed to complete the book). Over the years I have read the book over and over again and I still love it as much as back then (and I think there is no surprise that this old copy of the book is securely in my bookshelf, has been all those years I never gave it back).

Anyway.. where I wanted to get is, that I love books. I love stories. They have been inspiration to my artworks countless times. And I have loved all the bookcovers I have done as a commission. Bringing authors vision to visual form has been one of the most rewarding experience to me as an artist. But it is totally another experience trying to illustrate something that is very important to myself like my first published story. When the editor asked me (after learning I do art), if I would like to illustrate the story myself, I said yes without knowing to what I have agreed. The first drawback was that I realized that I had very specific vision about the characters and how the look, what they wear. I was no way able to find accurate stock or the poses I wished for. So, I actually spent few first nights working on this illustration being in a verge of despair, trying to find stock for my characters. In the end I realized it is not possible as I wish - so I had to give up some ideas and do a lot of creative matching to get the scene I wish for. I spent tens of hours with models, trying to make them look normal while they are indeed combination of 10+ different images. For example, the coat on the red-head was like 7-8 different aspects.. making the wings for it.. that was actually fun, specially making the zic-zac brush to mimic sewing. The other girl has less "stock pieces" but finding suitable ones was hard - she had to be young, scared but strong in the same time.. too much requirements for photomanipulator. I wish one day I can draw as well as I can do manips. Then my life would be so much easier.

Back to the story. It is scifi story about futuristic world where a conflict has ended but there are cell of dissidents still fighting. The dissidents who call themselves "Azrael's Angels" are forced to live in ghetto surrounded with wall where the Party has forcefully moved all people they find to be "threat" to the society. Accidentally a doctor's family with two young girls ended in the ghetto as the father helped a dissident instead of turning him over to the government. Iva, the oldest daughter (the dark haired girl in the image) ends up taking care of her younger sister when one night special forces come and take their parents. Two girls are left in hostile ghetto without knowing what exactly happened with their parents. Iva gets a job outside the ghetto in a hotel where important Party members and security forces are stationed. She catches the eye of a intelligence officer who offers her information about her parents if she joins the resistance and helps him to bring them down. She has no other option to agree and she has no love for the resistance either. She managed to join the cell but over time, she starts to believe in their cause and help them instead of the Party. But by that time she is way too over her head and when the resistance leaders start to realize there is a traitor inside the cell, things go bad. Basically, Iva knows there is no way out and she knows if she wants them to succeed, she has to die but it is hard choice to make.. specially, if the person who helped her join the cell was her best friend and she (the red-head in the image) also has to bear responsibility of Iva's actions. In the end, she is discovered as she decides to face the consequences instead of escaping... she explains her impossible choices and the people who make decisions feel sorry for her and understand her, but there is no way out.. to none of them.. so in the end, it is story how no matter what you do, you only have bad choices..

The image I think was even more challenging than the story. I talked about the complexity of bring characters I had strong vision into reality that was hard. But the scene around them. I spent whole evening dealing with the pond - seriously.. look at the original image that the pond was.. Somehow I managed to use it to have a shape that was more of my liking.. get the reflections correct and make it believable. Then I spent another evening making graffiti to the wall. You can hardly see them. And finding tall futuristic war turn buildings was another challenge. The file was huge in the end. Over 200 layers. And I felt I could just continue adding small details here and there but I just forced myself to stop before I start to hate the image. I think that was smart move as I am very proud of it - it is clean, very complicated work and it looks gorgeous and I think I managed to catch the atmosphere of what I originally wanted.

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