Eidolic Illustrated? (writer looking for artist)

[Haven]

TVTropes page

First part of a story I'll write more of when I'm not getting wtfpwned by school

So I've got this setting I've been working on for, um, wow, over ten years now. Output is sporadic--a few short stories, several chapters of various incomplete novels, and several files full of backstory and setting details mostly written from an in-character perspective. (Oh yeah, and a livejournal I guess.)

Anyway, I was always interested in an illustrated version of an Eidolic story, but frustrated by my utter lack of skills. Would anyone be interested?

If the (fairly sparse) trope page didn't help, let me try a summary: there's a vast region of space called the Eidolic, and then Weird Shit Happens. The stars are alive, mist swirls between them, and there are very few humanoid species. In other words, the kind of things you'd be looking to draw would be things you might never draw anywhere else, which is fun on the one hand, but I suppose not necessarily the best way to improve your style on the other. (Though I can compromise--I know it undergoes adaptation decay whenever I transfer it from my head to words, so understandably things would have to change from words to pictures)

I can come up with more details later, I'm just curious if anyone's interested in something like this. :o

[solstace]

If it's along the lines of Eldritch Abomination and High Octane Nightmare Fuel, I might be interested.

[Blackmoon]

I'm tempted, but I'm not terribly good at illustrating that sort of thing... best leave it to Solstace.

[Haven]

It's usually more on the idealistic side, actually.

Although I guess I could write a darker and edgier story in that setting (there are definitely horrors cosmic lurking around the edges, and as William has witnessed I can be very dark when I want to be ).

[cales]

An idealistic story can still drown in Eldritch Abominations and High Octane Nightmare Fuel- look at "Grinch Night" for a good example. The story can be one about hope, despite all the horrible evil running around.

In fact, that makes a story more idealistic overall, if there are horrors in it. A hero who overcomes Bill is not that great a hero. The guy who fights Cthulhu and wins, though, he gets remembered.

[Tom]

My brain bleeds mind screw and nightmares, on occasion, and since my drawing style tends to mix a fairly harmless look with a great deal of horror and general creepiness I'd go for this. I'll understand if you'd like Solstace to draw it instead though.

We could each post a piece of what you'd like to see, giving you the opportunity to pick between each style.

[cales]

Or you two could work together on the piece, one doing the stuff the other doesn't like, and vice versa.

[Haven]

Oct 16, 2009 0:30:19 GMT -5 Tom said:

My brain bleeds mind screw and nightmares, on occasion, and since my drawing style tends to mix a fairly harmless look with a great deal of horror and general creepiness I'd go for this.

I like the sound of this.

I'll understand if you'd like Solstace to draw it instead though.

We could each post a piece of what you'd like to see, giving you the opportunity to pick between each style.

That'd be great. Solstace-sama, are you up for it?

...Alternatively! I could write two stories. :o

Also, I came up with a sample idea for the story content (with the idea of being a little more "cynical" in mind); it currently feels a little derivative, so call it an example of the kind of thing that might happen.

First, backstory: At the point in the setting this story would take place in, people are starting to returned to the Eidolic after a great cataclysm forced them to a region "above" it called the Shattering; there's a port town called New Edge. But there isn't much room, so expeditions are periodically sent into the mists of space to try to find more land and maybe re-establish communications with anyone who didn't evacuate to the Shattering during this whole cataclysm (a recent successful expedition found a hospital, and the one I linked above is another such expedition).

So a clearing in the mists reveals an impressive, corkscrew-shaped tower floating in the distance; no one knows what it is, except that it's huge and could provide a lot more room if it turns out to be livable. So an expedition gets sent out. They enter it, find it mostly empty of anything worthwhile or even interesting...and then it starts spinning, slowly and noisily. Expedition starts experiencing slightly disturbing hallucinations at certain points in each revolution, eventually realizes they aren't hallucinations, and they are losing mass the longer they stay in the tower (and to complete the cliche, they find they can't leave--or see outside the tower, in fact). They try to communicate with a bizarre consciousness they find in the "hallucinatory" reality--somewhat successfully. It's not malicious, it's just a little weird...

And after the hallucinatory part of it ends, one of them has entirely disappeared except for a little bit of dust on the floor...and the tower starts spinning much faster. They look around frantically to try to find a way to slow it down, and to make a long story short (shit, it's 2 am isn't it?) they don't succeed, most of them die--BUT. At the end, they find out the creature they were talking to was the tower's "AI" (not to make it less of a cosmic horror though; the equivalent of AI will be a spirit bound to the tower). It turns out this is an Actuator, which is designed to create land; it saw the expedition's desire to find more space for the people they serve, and interpreted that as permission to use their bodies and souls as raw material.

The story ends on a surprisingly optimistic note, though: they've all become Genii Loci of the new land they've created, and watch over a new wave of settlers (I think this would be displayed something like this: an adorable baby cub is about to fall into a river, but then an unexpected gust of wind saves him; pan out to show landscape that resembles features of deceased members).

So some visual themes in this story would be: the other reality they enter during the rotations is very constricted, in contrast to the expansive tower (I'm thinking the huge, empty rooms can serve as a visual metaphor for how totally clueless they are about the function of the place). Also, everything is skewed at an odd angle in it (and there's a color difference too--everything is dark blue in the main reality because the lights are off, but gradually lights up after every rotation with a warm, comforting yellow; in contrast, the other reality is bright but washed out, like ridiculous amounts of bloom).

The spirit they meet is starving; I'm not sure what it should look like other than having some relation to its function, but not in a way that totally gives it away. It should be pretty scary and disturbing--alien, even to all the aliens that make up the expedition--but of course it is not really evil, just having communication problems.

The crew is a diverse bunch; I'm not sure what exactly they'd be but at least one needs to be Epacian: brown-green, scaly, an epic lantern jaw (containing very long, pointy, silver teeth), and uh...to be lazy with the description, a centaur except velociraptor-horse instead of human-horse (but the "horse" bit is also scaly, and there's no tail). Also, they love metallic armor (visually a cross between a knight's armor and his horse's), but this guy's is a little rusty because no one knows how to take care of it anymore in this day and age. I think another member would be some sort of a weaver (insectoid) for thematic purposes...maybe a "thermodynastic" (lazy description time: sloth-bear things that are totally blind and don't really have heads that can be differentiated from their bodies; just a small black nub that hints at one, but is actually a sophisticated heat sensor--their main perceptual mode is heat instead of vision. They talk and eat through a hole on their "backs", though they are flexible enough that the differentiation is difficult to make. Some have fire magic; I don't think this one would though.)

Probably more later, but that's what I'm thinking ATM. Like I said, I'm amenable to scaling back if this is too ambitious or unnecessarily complex.

[solstace]

That sounds really awesome. I'll do some concept sketches later, to see if I can do it justice.

[Tom]

I had to convince someone I wasn't on drugs while drawing these. It went somewhat like this:

"Hey, what're you doing?"

"Drawing a raptorhorse in armor wielding a butcher's blade and a fly in a space suit."

"How much?"

"How much what?"

"How much did the pot cost?"

Anyway. I drew some sketches of possible expedition people, but since I'm still a bit iffy on what they wear...


P.S. horses are hard to draw.

[solstace]

Yes they are. I really like your style.

Haven, I'll hopefully have some of my stuff up tomorrow.

[solstace]

Wait, nevermind. I think I'll let Tom take care of this.

[cales]

I think Tom's pictures are awesome. Obviously, as a writer, not involved, but this is pretty damn awesome!

[Haven]

Tom: I like it! It's not exactly what I had in mind but I seem to have missed some pretty important details because I was posting at 2 am? Not that this is much better but:

For the first one--the feet should be claws too, and the horse part would be a little shorter (again, not that I can expect you to have known this from my description). Aside from that, the general thing about Epacians is that they are "heroic". That corner of this setting started out as my parody of heroic fantasy and then, well, I decided to make them velociraptorhorses, I guess "what if the noble knight WAS a lizard" might have been my reasoning? So that should be reflected in their design too.

Anyway, yeah, in this story that character will be a fairly large ham. He'll be the one giving out the infodump inspirational speech reminding everyone who they're trying to save and protect here. So he'll either be the first to die (for the shock of losing the leader and the really inspirational one) or the second-to-last (leaving us with a "final girl" type character, and also letting us see how his attempts at idealism hold up throughout the story in a hopeless seeing situation).

As for spacesuits and clothing--short version, spacesuits aren't needed and everyone's clothing probably has an emblem distinguishing them as an expedition from the port of New Edge painted on it somewhere, but otherwise is idiosyncratic--no uniform. (The emblem would probably be...just a copper-colored starburst design, I guess. I don't have anything particular in mind for it.)

Instead of spacesuits, they have faint glowing auras. Why? For the long version involving setting metaphysics:

So "space" in the Eidolic is less vacuum (since there are mists and storms and dust and stuff) and more a lack of reality. Worlds are contained in bubbles of reality--like an atmosphere, but for laws of physics and whatnot--and everyone takes a little bit of that with them when they leave their homeworld. Normally space travel is accomplished by using this to fly through space, but it's sort of a crapshoot unless you really know what you're doing (and in the day & age of the setting, no one does because they'd all been kicked out of the Eidolic for, let's say 10,000 years). So the expedition is going to arrive on some kind of ship.

Anyway, yeah, so they all have faintly glowing auras around them (all the same color and design, because in this case it's the reality of New Edge they've taken with them) and that's what's protecting them from space instead of a space suit. When they're in the "other" reality, they don't have them though (to make for yet another nice visual contrast). It probably won't be explained that that's exactly what it is, because I hate infodumps, but the idea should be "How are they all in space without dying? Because they all have some sort of forcefield. Oh, okay." And hopefully that'll comes across.

I've never done a collaboration like this before and I'm excited, but also fairly clueless Please let me know if my form of feedback is useful, or if it's not working (I don't know if asking for changes like I did above is too much or too little or what). I'm willing to be really flexible about the whole project too--I don't consider anything about the setting a particularly sacred cow, so if anything is too abstract to render visually, or it just doesn't turn out as well, let me know.

Aside from that, very much looking forward to working with ya!

[Tom]

Current style to be used, is there something you want changed regarding the style itself? Thicker lines, shadows, etc.

Anything really, just making some drafts before we begin with the real thing.