After a late night discussion yesterday, I realized I had to throw away my idea for this year's DOR picture.

Originally, I was planning on showing a physical assault on Novella set to her dispassionate narration. It still looks compelling in my imagination, but it presented a number of problems. First of all, the scene is difficult to draw. I do not believe my current level of skill would be good enough to render it adequately. Secondly, I would make an attempt if I had more time. I only have two days to draw, the quality would suffer. Lastly, the narration itself has problems. It could be edited, but it didn't seem to work. All of this combined led me to strike off in another direction.

This year's DOR theme is to show your character matter-of-factly describe the circumstances of their death, and how not being cisnormative played into it. How I was approaching this theme seemed wrong. It almost seemed to clash with the character of Novella herself. Instead, I decided to expand upon my Paper Angel sketch. The image to the layout of that expansion.

The masks are key to both Novella's character, and the message I intend to convey with the image. I hope that between now and tomorrow evening, I will come up with suitable narration. What that narration will be, however, I do not know. I'm operating under instinct at the moment. I'm following the image in my head, hopefully it will reveal it's meaning to me soon.

On a technical note, I am using a new sketching technique with this image. In previous images, I had drawn in black as I would have in a pencil drawing. I would "rough in" the image, refine it, and then add detail. This led to significant cleanup time. Now I draw the rough-in in blue. I refine it, then I create a new layer and draw the final lineart. It seems to lend itself to rapid development of an image compared to my previous method.