ON A‘,4 TURK'S PROTOTYPES: CHARACTER DESIGN AND \VORLDBUUJMNG Taylor J. Bardon COLUMBUS STATE UNIVERSITY ON NATURE’S PROTOTYPES: CHARACTER DESIGN AND WORLDBUILDING A THESIS SUBMITTED TO THE HONORS COLLEGE IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR HONORS IN THE DEGREE OF BACHELOR OF FINE ARTS DEPARTMENT OF ART COLLEGE OF THE ARTS BY TAYLOR J. BARDON I ABSTRACT Nature’s Prototypes is an ongoing narrative series that blends realism and fiction to create both dialectic plot structures and image sets. For substance, the series utilizes biological inquiries into fields, like ecology, pathology, and bioengineering, to imagine action-centric vignettes, where animalistic to monstrous characters become the predominant actors in a post-dystopian worldscape. Throughout these vignettes, these characters are subjected to the trials and tribulations of the catalysts and flux that are imposed upon them. In the series’ larger scope, these vignettes are sequential events within a larger timeline and an original mythos that delve into the implications and the intrigue surrounding the idea of synthetic organisms - both artificial and naturally evolved. Conceptual in nature, the series functions as a continual framework for exploring and deducing the eclectic relationships found between the aforementioned fields. INDEX WORDS: narrative, sequential art, worldbuilding, synthetic biology, Lovecrafit, transmutation, elder evil II TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT.i LIST OF FIGURES.iii INTRODUCTION.1-5 CHAPTER 1.6-35 1.1 SYNTHETIC ORGANISMS AND THE UNORTHODOX.6-15 1.2 PARADIGM SHIFTS AND THE UMBER CELL.16-24 1.3 THE ANTHROPOLES’ FAILURE.25-35 CHAPTER 2.36-54 2.1 CONSERVATION OR PRESERVATION?.36-43 2.2 A BIO-ARMS RACE AND ANIMACYTES.44-54 CHAPTER 3.55-85 2.1 THE INVOLUTARY MEMORY AND MODERNITY’S AURA.55-69 2.2 THE WORLDSKIN AND TWISTED LIFE.70-85 CONCLUSION.86-90 BIBLIOGRAPHY.95 iii LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1.1. Conceptual diagram of a healthy protected area.28 Figure 3.1. The Red Legion illustration and description.64 Figure 3.2. The Gloomwings illustration and description.65 Figure 3.3. Ragnorra's fragmented form.74 Figure 3.4. Ragnorra's True Mother form.77 Figure 3.5. Worldskin Query (Main Emblem) illustration and description.78 Figure 3.6. Circle ofRhiza illustration and description.80 Figure 3.7. Worldskin Query (Rhiza Totemic Figure) illustration and description.81 Figure 3.8. Circle ofKor illustration and description.82 Figure 3.9. Worldskin Query (Kor Totemic Figure) illustration and description.83 Figure 3.10. Circle of Flos illustration and description.85 1 INTRODUCTION Quite the literal prototype, itself, Nature’s Prototypes is an ongoing science fictional, narrative series by, myself, Taylor Bardon, both a digital illustrator and a sequential artist based in Columbus, Georgia. The series’ conception began circa late 2016 as I began to meditate upon where to and how to develop my personal portfolio during my undergraduate studies under Columbus State University’s Department of Art. Through a combination of my analytical personality and my continual consumption of media entertainment, I settled on attempting to establish an original, narrative series that emphasizes worldbuilding and character design. Within the choice of using worldbuilding as a focal point, the series became a large undertaking for consolidating major, storytelling elements and visual design. The former deals with chronology and exposition, while the latter deals with chosen media and possible demographics. Generally, as these elements attain cohesion, a new, imposing element may upheave this cohesion. This instability comes from me seeking to create works that are both dialectic in their proposed narrative structure and sensorially appealing in how they mesh together into a unified, visual style. Especially during the series’ conception, the key to consolidating these elements was through focusing on a central, thematic subject. However, such a subject would need to contain a vast degree of realism in both the interactions happening and relationships existing within an enlivened world. For me, these broad considerations became addressable through researching the scientific field of biology. In particular, the classic theme of man versus nature further focused in the scope of my research as biology, itself, is an inarguably extensive subject. As built upon conflicts, the series’ tone and imaginings became attributable as narrative vignettes about action¬ centric scenarios. Within these vignettes, animalistic to monstrous characters became the 2 predominant actors in a post-dystopian worldscape. Here, I often frame them as being subjected to the trials and tribulations of the catalysts and flux that are imposed upon them. Both the emotional masks and logical stances that these characters metaphorically wear and mentally exhibit are surmisable as distancing in their alien aspects due to their supernatural, adaptive physiologies and evolutionary histories. A further is conducted through conceptualizing them as fragmented, artificial, fabricated, synthesized, etcetera. With manmade influences being the primary cause, these character either evolved or laid dormant within the narrative’s scope. The imposed catalysts and flux are these manmade influences among other supernatural phenomena as the series’ chronology has been continually extending to encompass a past timeline, referred to as the Prequel, and a concurrent timeline, referred to as the Post-Cataclysm. The reasoning for having two interconnected timelines is what I will be partially explaining in the following sections, but primarily it became a logical, utilitarian choice to allow the series’ breadth when contending with biological evolutions and ecological trajectories. These aspects hold the capacity to ground the more fantastical/mystical elements inherent in the series, such as creatures describable as living natural disasters and others that have a high, almost universal transmutability. Grounding the equivalent of materialized metaphysics with empirical concepts directly reflects within my explanations on and descriptions of the series: generally complex to convoluted. Just as one will be able to glean from my discussion of the timelines in the following chapters, this writing’s lexicon will be as vast as the series’ worldscape. As the series is now, it is mostly conceptual. Within Nature’s Prototypes, its visual design proposes one of the greatest, yet rewarding, difficulties within its development. In its earliest development, the chosen media for the series was mostly focused on animation practices and the pursuit of therefore. Animation proposed a framework for creating shorter works and, 3 subsequently, shorter insights into either the broader, thematic strokes relating to man versus nature or the imagined characters’/creatures’ potential dynamism in their physics and anatomical structures. Ultimately, animation, by itself or as the primary medium, became too detached from what I eventually felt 1 needed to prioritize. Rather being too indifferent from successful animation practices, my new priorities revolved around the idea of naturalism as conducted through illustration. Being naturalistic within my illustrations comes from my desire to attain an adeptness at rendering the series’ character designs within a tighter span of realistic, visual accuracy and believability. In contrast, trying to attain a photorealistic precision of my imagined designs is not incredibly desirous for me. My stylistic aim is more about understanding the organisms and environments I develop within a more rounded context. For these imagined organisms, I am interested in their realistic parallels’ ecologies and adaptations, which would comprise their hybridized selves. For these imagined environments, 1 am interested in their geological mechanics and shifting natural boundaries that would constitute them as inhabitable. In physical form, I have been producing illustrations for a body of work I entitled the Theatre Tapestry series. Multiplicitous in nature, this body of work is focused on rendering the core subjects and factions as dramatic, symbolic, and vector-based illustrations. This series’ different visual styles, as between its illustrations, have their slight differences in the figural subject’s conflation, abstraction, and ornamentation. These stylistic differences are determined as subjects’ associations to the source material (i.e., Nature’s Prototypes) are fleshed out. Aesthetically, the unifying, stylistic elements within this series are the erasure between overlapping visual elements and sparse, textural renderings among flat, black-tone shape groups. Conceptually, these illustrations’ stark flatness and organic shapes function as eventual, interchangeable symbols within the scope of the source material. Namely, they potentially would 4 be seen as reoccurring pictorial symbols that the inhabitants within the fictional world would interface with. The aforementioned is especially true for the smaller, inlaid, and symbolic pieces that depict subsets within the individual factions or collectives. The larger, symbolic pieces are narrower in their conceptual application within the source material as they would be reserved for prominent material culture and literary items. In relation to illustrating such artifacts or civilized elements within Nature’s Prototypes, I have, also, begun to explore bookmaking design practices under a project titled the Alabaster Archive. This project revolves around the continual drafting and creation of a compendium that gives dossiers on figural subjects and locations within the source material. In essence, this compendium functions more expressly as a bestiary-of-sorts that gives gradual, eclectic insights into the worldscape as I and, by extension, the fictional scholars within the series compose my and their findings. Largely still in its infancy, the Alabaster Archive is another undertaking in visual design altogether different from the Theatre Tapestry series as I seek to develop a shifting, aesthetic style that reflects the subject being discussed on its pages as structured by intermittent chapters. The self-imposed design challenges I face mainly involve developing unique font styles, border detail, and language tones that constitute possibly one of the only written books contained within the series. For narrative reasons, the series’ greater inhabitants are less concerned about cataloguing a world still in flux as they vie for survival and, for some, an outlying understanding of this flux’s cause. In actuality, this compendium will hopefully act as a comprehensive guide for the elements at play within my series for my audience. Moreover, in the following sections, I will be discussing more about my concurrent insights into Nature’s Prototypes’ character design and worldbuilding through discussing some