Let’s talk art! Do you draw your characters? Do others draw them? Pick one of your OCs and post your favorite picture of him!

Ohh, how exciting! Right, well straight off the bat…no, I don’t…or rather, I don’t anymore. The one I did try my hand at in various incarnations was Catrina. In ye olde days, I did draw characters…badly…but I can’t find the sketches (thankfully!), so I can’t show you the early ones.

In mid-2006, I purchased a graphics tablet (on a whim, as I do for 99% of the gadgetry I end up with), and I decided that I was good at art. Turns out I wasn’t, but in the brief time before I realised that, I drew some pictures. This was a Catrina attempt, in all her freakishly big-eyed, eyebrow-less glory. She looks a bit like Jessica Rabbit, or maybe a Gelfling, neither of which is what I picture Catrina looking like, at all. Although I do quite like how I did the hair.

Anyway.

After reading The Genesis, Kier Gill (a friend of mine, who also happens to be an incredibly talented graphical artist), became interested in making a graphic novel series to go alongside it, and illustrated Catrina (amongst everyone else) in a way that is about a thousand times better than I ever could. Kier also illustrated the cover for The Genesis. He is still working on the graphic novel, although I have to say he — like me — is a professional procrastinator, so the finished product may be a while coming yet. You can expect it out with the VS sequels.

Now, while my artistic skills could obviously use some work, I think that I am somewhat decent photo manipulation skills (I say ‘somewhat’, because I’m not brilliant…in fact, I’m far from it).

I created the Creature, for example, using a body builder’s torso, a clawed monster’s arm prop, a dragon’s head, antelope horns (or some other gazelle/goat/Bambi type, I can’t remember now exactly which animal they came from) and smushed them all together (the background/scene, FYI, is an amalgamation of the background from American McGee’s Alice and the mirror scene from the PC game Bad Mojo, with the mirror itself coming to me from Google).

This image in particular was also inspired by Apartment 26′s Backwards song, which is also where one of the scenes in The Genesis came from.

I realise I’m wandering off the beaten path of the question towards drawings, as such, but I’m on a roll now, so I might as well show you one more thing, and that’s the Catrina Collection.

What’s the Catrina Collection, I hear you ask, with a sense of foreboding and dread, as well as an overtone of disregard? Well, since I’m no good at art, I try instead to draw inspiration on the things that I insist on doing instead of writing, in the form of making Catrinas everywhere.

The attempt on physical resemblance to Catrina naturally depends on the flexibility of the software in question, as shown in the pictures. My personal favourite is the Second Life version, because the engine is so very diverse in what you can create.

If you are interested in doing your own 30 Days of Writing, here are the questions.