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Where Banished Eyes Haven't Been By Marc Ellerby 2005
Introduction. I drew this comic for my Semester Six project of my Illustration Degree course. It was the last project I had left to do and as it turned out, it nearly killed me. I had originally had the idea to do a sort of Alice in Wonderland type story where a girl is exported to a dream world where she must face up to certain events in her life, instead of ignoring them. It was going to have a talking cat in it. The script however spiralled out of control and I got so scared that I wouldn't have enough time to draw it I panicked, scraped the whole thing (five weeks into the project mind you and the night before a presentation) and decided to go with a book about having no idea. Cliché? Well....not entirely. I wanted to write a book about how much pressure I had from having a huge success of my last project (My Sketchbook Diary - Egocentricity got a lot of attention and the grade kicked arse) and how that effected me coming into this project. I wanted to explore how you can put all your effort into forcing an idea, but in the end, if it's not there, it's simply not. fucking. there. During this time, I broke up with a girlfriend, got back with another and my parents split up. Add to this a viral infection and early symptoms of IBS and you have the perfect ingredients of a very upset stressed little art student. Some of the art goes a bit wonky and I could of clarified some of the characters a bit more. The three monsters that pop in the cavern section represent three different types of emotion I was feeling at the time in regards to my art. Indifference (small monster playing his Gameboy) Success (tall monster, drinking coffee) and Failure (fat, large, brutish, loud monster.) The sad monster who appears in the shadows is supposed to represent Regret. I don't think I got this across in the book itself, so that's why I'm mentioning it here. My art came into it's own here. I didn't want to draw realistically anymore and I wanted to fully stretch my cartoonist wings, something I've been holding back on up to this point really. So I decided to go with the basic three fingers and a thumb routine and I loved the outcome. I actually done a very short print run. There are some photos here to prove it. I printed them myself on my Epson printer and it took FOREVER. So don't go asking me if I'm going to do another run myself because I'm seriously never doing that again. I think there's about 13 in the world so yeah talk about uber limited edition. If you've read this and want to tell me how much you ________ it, then maybe you could email me? That would be nice. Marc
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