It begins?

It's been quite a while since I last did this. I tried when I was briefly caught up in the idea of making my own assets for a game I had barely even written a skeleton for, but quit. There are always reasons to quit. It might be too much of a workload, deadlines too tight, social obligations, personal problems, the list could, and does, go on. But I'm here to try again, because

If not now, when?

So, what am I doing? Well, aside from changing a lifetime of bad habits, and attempting to reignite my joy for drawing, I'm going to make a picture book. Not particularly groundbreaking, I know. I do work in the children's publishing arena and have for quite a few years now, but after multiple attempts and failures at getting my own written work published, I essentially gave up and fell into a semi-comfortable state of depression. 

At times I thought, why not just make your own anyway? I mean, I did that at uni, why not now? Who even cares if something is publishable? Granted, a successful career would be fantastic, and I certainly do need to be earning more money than I am, but if I only choose to create when I believe it could make me money, then I've forgotten the entire point, and joy, of creating at all. 

Ok, enough rambling on. Most people who have known me fairly well over the past two decades know that a) I love nature b) I love it when nature reclaims manmade creations and c) I've had a thing for post-apocalyptic stories and settings for quite some time. More so the green variety of such worlds as The Last of Us, than the bleak desert of the Mad Max franchise.

The stories that take place in these worlds are incredibly bleak - Mankind does not play well with each other when they're desperate, something highlighted in basically all post-apocalyptic stories. I love these stories, but I don't want to tell one of those stories. I barely even want to tell a story at all. My idea at this point is entirely visual. I want to visualize the world without humans in a beautiful picture book style. That's it. I've thought about applying a message to it, perhaps showing the long-term effects of the damage we've done to the planet, but seeing the world recover after everything we do to harm it is what I want to see, and therefore create. Oh yeah, so the working title thus far is

AFTER

I know, it's not the most original. There are movies and books and probably a whole bunch of other forms of media with similar titles. After Earth, After Us, after a quick google I've even seen there's a film straight-up called After, so I may need to amend that. My idea kind of comes from a book I started reading a long time ago, which I think was adapted for a TV series (remember to research, Dan) called The World Without Us. I vaguely recall the narrator talking us through what would happen if humans just disappeared, and that's the same way I want to treat this story. I want humans to just be gone from this world, no cause, no remaining people, just everything they left behind. I also got this idea from Everybody's Gone to the Rapture, a walking-simulator narrative game, which I'd have enjoyed a whole lot more if they hadn't made the walking speed so painfully accurate to my actual walking speed. In that story, people have been raptured away from Earth, except for the player, who explores a small British village not long after the event. In my story, I want a couple of decades to have passed so that I can shamelessly cover everything with greenery and rubble from the general lack of maintenance. I don't know if that's entirely accurate to what would happen, and I could certainly research this in regards to places like Pripyat, or even just by watching that TV program, but I might not. If this project stops being fun I will probably stop working on it, and I don't want that to happen.

I've typed long enough, I'll add some pictures of my first concept images that started this whole process. Oh, I almost forgot, a dog in a raincoat is the 'character' that will be leading us through these places. For now. I suppose I should spend a little more time on the design of the character, although I do like her simplicity, and who doesn't like dogs?

Tomorrow I'll start posting my references/inspiration.