sylvia-morris-reblogs:

sylvia-morris:

the haunted mirror.

I don’t ever really draw without creating a story around whatever I’m drawing. Sometimes they change a lot from the beginning of a picture to the end. They almost always get more complex/detailed, which I think is good. At the start of this one, I was just gonna have a lady in a nice 1800s dress playing piano in a formal sitting room. Probably on a sunny afternoon. I wanted her to seem lonely, and perhaps trapped by the imposing room. I wanted her looking in a mirror so we could see the front and back of her dress.

The light was what caused all the changes in this one. I wanted a hanging light because I thought it would make a nicer composition. So it became an evening piece with cool lighting. After I’d gotten attached to that idea I realised that the 1800s weren’t real big on electric lights… and having a fancy chandelier wouldn’t make a lot of narrative sense (maybe it could’ve, but I didn’t like it).

I could drop the light and have an 1800s dress, or I could keep the light and drop a modern woman into a fancy old room. I set it aside for a little (longer than planned because I spent 3 hours with a super painful eye thanks to some dirt or something) and figured I’d decide later. But later I couldn’t give up either the dress or the light and somehow in that space of stubbornness I decided that the mirror was haunted.

This carefree woman moves into a fancy old house and whenever she plays piano and looks in the mirror she finds a woman who looks a little like her looking back out of it. I liked the idea of her trying to find out all about the other people who’d lived in this house and whatnot. But I tend to keep it a little open too. Perhaps she steps into the past. Perhaps they swap lives. Perhaps actually the story is that of the woman in the mirror who’s seeing a ghost from the future whenever /she/ plays piano. Who knows. The story is definitely about the connection between two women who lived in the same house 150 years apart.

Reposted from http://ift.tt/1pBw4Lv.

Tags: whoa.

This entry was posted by jbc on Friday, March 25th, 2016 at 5:57 am and is filed under Tumblr. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.