Breakthrough

“People talk about escapism as if it's a bad thing... Once you've escaped, once you come back, the world is not the same as when you left it. You come back to it with skills, weapons, knowledge you didn't have before. Then you are better equipped to deal with your current reality.”  

 Over the weekend I had a breakthrough with my roughs and started working on ideas for a concept I really like and think I can communicate well as a book or as a series of prints. The idea is to illustrate fantasy characters trying to use typical modern day escapism to get away from there normal lives. I want to try and create a narrative where the ogre/cyclops fails in very attempt to use escapism finding himself in sad and quite funny situations. I want the final image to be the ogre sat in his cave reading a book and looking happy and content.

I want to use this role reversal to show how people that find it hard to fit in or take part in popular forms of escapism can use reading, especially reading fiction as a way to get away from their day to day life. I have been researching activities that are commonly used as escapism such as television, music, sport, drugs, video games and adrenaline. The next step is to find activities that an ogre couldn't do (which is obviously all of them because he's a made up creature from a fantasy book), activities where its stature or effect on 'normal' people means the activity doesn't work. I want the images to be funny but use the right tone to show how sad the situation is for the ogre.

“Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.”  

I want the narrative to end with the ogre finding its perfect form of escapism reading a book. I think the book should be something as far away from fantasy as possible, something that could tech the ogre something it would not find in its own world. I also need to keep brainstorming more ideas for situations the ogre can get into on his escapism adventures, I want each one to stand out and work as a concept without having to stretch or manipulate the scenario.

“I think that pretty much every form of fiction (I’d include fantasy, obviously) can actually be a real escape from places where you feel bad, and from bad places. It can be a safe place you go, like going on holiday, and it can be somewhere that, while you’ve escaped, actually teaches you things you need to know when you go back, that gives you knowledge and armour and tools to change the bad place you were in. So no, they’re not escapist. They’re escape.”

Neil Gaiman