i am sooo thematically consistent actually lmfao
My final contribution to Repostober 2024 :) Loose "redraw" of this sketch that I posted last year. Scan and words below the break.
I know the phrase "rewired my brain" gets thrown around a lot in fandom but I honest-to-God think Ghost Channel really did it. If it's not THE formative thing in my taste for horror, it imprinted pretty damn hard on my little babby brain. To this day, the memory of watching it for the first time stands out as my earliest experience where I've needed to pick my jaw off the floor and then marinate for a bit.
For those not in the know, Ghost Channel is an episode late into season one of Code: Lyoko. It is freely available to watch online, but if you're even a little interested in watching it, I highly recommend watching it in sequence, despite the episodic nature of S1.
Original scan, from 2009ish:
I'm sure I've mentioned it, but before I realized the importance of archiving my art I threw away virtually everything I had relating to CL >___< Later, I thought it might be fun to redraw some pillars from my childhood fandoms and this sketch happened. I've posted a few things for Repostober so far that were products of this same effort.
Reinterpreting this in 2024 was a challenge. My taste in horror hasn't changed much over the years, but the way I enjoy it definitely has. The 2009 scan reads as an in-your-face tribute to the episode (to me, at least), but these days I'm a much, MUCH bigger fan of subtlety and the power of implication. Redrawing it 1:1 bugged me a little since I didn't feel it'd meet my current standards or do the episode justice. I'm a firm believer in "less is more" so I spent a loootttt of time grappling with a good 'redraw' that 2024 me would accept while still passing as... well... a redraw xD I suppose it is still conceptually the same.
Jeremie is easily my favorite in the CL gang which definitely has nothing to do with the fact that I seem to have a proven history of latching onto the prodigal child with glasses and I've always found it crazy poetic that one of the only (or maybe the only?) big bad's true manifestations in the show is in his image. Something something thematic parallels, you love to see it >:) CL already has this habit of depicting shit that I would normally attribute to the modus operandi of a supernatural, demonic force so of COURSE I was gonna get in on this LMAO
Unfortunately, unless I find a hidden stash of old CL fanart somewhere... or enough time passes for me to draw this again... this is probably my last CL art for a while </3
On a more technical note for as much time as I gave myself for this I really popped off, especially on the background o___o Code Lyoko BG art goes super hard in general though, I don't think I would have settled for anything less. Had tons of fun with the VHS effects, learned lots of new little tricks to distort images for future projects.
Also this piece is called "ENDKAMPF" in my files lol
