Some Things Never Change
For years I’ve been a fan of anime and manga since I first had my eyeballs sucked out of my head going to the theater to see Akira, and I’ve been rather disheartened by the recent offering from both. They’re nearly devoid of a plot, and American animation has been and mostly remains so. A friend of mine, Niko Geyer, pointed me to Avatar: The Last Airbender. He expressed similar dissatisfaction with the current state of Japanese animation, and said that it was his escape from it all. I knew about it, but seeing as it was produced by Nickelodeon I figured that it was shit just like everything else is on that channel. I forgot about it apparently, and never gave the show another thought until a few months ago when I was bored and needed something else to watch. I remembered our conversation, and decided to give it a go. Boy were my preconceived notions incorrect. It’s nothing short of the best example of American television animation in recent memory.
Back when Niko and I had our discussion about the show he painted a picture to express his gratification. We fell out of contact for a while for no apparent reason, and I never glimpsed it until just a month or so ago. After seeing his illustration I just had to create my own.
I wanted to do something completely different from what Niko did; our styles’ being completely different from each other would assure that, but I wanted to do more of an action scene. Aang is rather easygoing and just enjoys having fun, so in his actions I didn’t want to demonstrate any ferocity. I, however, wanted to demonstrate his bending. There is a scene in the first season where Aang is visiting the Southern Air temple. In a fit of annoyance at someone’s showing off he flaunts by riding his “air scooter” along the vertical walls of the temple. This illustration, however, takes place after the storyline in the television show ends. He and his pet lemur, Momo, are out goofing off at an air temple rather than out helping the populace like an Avatar is assumed to do. That’s the impetus for the title to this piece: “Some Things Never Change”.
The image above will either be static or animatic depending on what browser you are using. At the time of this writing only Opera and Firefox support animated PNG’s. The image above shows my progress with illustrating the picture and if clicked on will bring up a larger version of itself displaying the entirety of the piece. Flickr’s policy dictates that when linking back to Flickr any image should link back to its page; however, in this case that’s not really ideal as the page for the image itself shows a shrunken image which is devoid of the animation itself, so I am linking to the image’s original size page. I believe there can be an exception in this case.
The most difficult thing to draw in here was Momo. Momo is called a lemur in the TV show, but he looks absolutely nothing like one does in real life. A lemur is a primate that only natively lives on Madagascar and has a bear-like face with large bulging eyes. The upright stance and the eyes were the only things that Momo retained from his authentic brethren. He proved difficult to draw partially because I’m not used to drawing anything resembling him. I did several sketches trying to figure out just how to construct his face, and I decided to model it fractionally upon a cat’s face. My initial thought on placement of him was changed as well. I originally intended for him to fly in front of Aang; while it looked fine in my sketches it didn’t look right when painted, so I moved him to his present location. In addition, that alteration required an adjustment of Aang’s eyes as I wanted him to be looking at his little friend. In the end I think I did an okay job with Momo, but I believe if I felt like it I could do better. I just felt as if I spent enough time on the illustration by that point.
This is my first illustration in quite some time, and as stated before on here I find myself a bit restive if I don’t at least illustrate something from time to time. Drawing calms me; this was the result of such expression. I’m unsure what I’ll do next, but I hope it was as fun as it was when working on this.
The completed illustration without the animation can be found by clicking on the image of Momo above.