Suicide is Painless

Almost six years later, I have no clue what inspired me to draw the image of a girl committing suicide while resting on a moon. A lot of the imagery has a symbolic meaning to me, don’t get me wrong, the problem is most of it (and the date on it) conflicts with each other. Your guess is as good as mine.

Then again, it’s entirely possible (not to mention very likely) that it doesn’t so much have symbolic meaning, rather I just liked (and still do) the visual. I did, after all, go through a phase where macabre imagery fascinated me more than jolly fairy-tale “happily ever after.” Screw that. Give me Edgar Allen Poe’s Masque of the Red Death.

I kinda like her proportion to the frame—she doesn’t fill the frame, she’s just a smaller part of it—alone within its space. That said, I failed to really use the negative space effectively. Consistent gray for the background, very similar to her pants and shirt. White moon and star, eerily close to the value on her flesh and hair. Instead of alone and interesting in the image, she’s alone and visually stale—blending in with the image around her. Dying in a monotone with flat shading! Boring.

That and I didn’t quite render her correctly—her right leg dangling off the moon doesn’t quite look right as if her whole leg is arced versus just bent at the knee. Her sitting position looks unnatural as though she’s making an effort to sit up—she really should be more slumped, in a more relaxed.

Really the only point of interest is the image of slit wrists and a falling knife, which reads more like bipolar angsty teen’s desperate bid for attention (maybe that was the reasoning behind this image!) It’s really a waste in retrospect—it’s an image that relies solely upon its content with no regard for its presentation (which is a phenomena I like to refer to as “amateurish”.) This is the type of imagery where an artist can really have fun and play with the style—to really hammer home the imagery or use a blatantly contrasting style to provide an eerie commentary via the tone.

The funny thing is, the more I look at this image today, I’m very tempted to redraw it with a more distinct girl in a more interesting pose. A darker world around her with shadows enveloping her, minimal lighting from the a better rendered star that barely illuminates her, perhaps? I dunno. It’s something I’d have to play with. I just know that right now this image screams for 8B lead pencil and not the stupid mechanical pencil I initially used.