#rip squad

Oh my wonderful disastrous fictional cursed teens with trauma that I’ve neglected for years—it’s been ages since I provided any information about their storyline. I’m not going to get into the specifics right now, but essentially I created these guys MANY Octobers ago (2020) based on an Inktober prompt for the word “rip.” I didn’t read it correctly, and so I mistook “rip” for the acronym “R.I.P” and thus the R.I.P Squad of characters had been created! This was the page that birthed them into existence:

I’ve made lots of readjustments to their character designs since then (I’ll show a few examples from 2023 now. Although I’d argue even these ones are outdated by this point, since my artstyle has changed so much):

The main takeaway is that Elaine (the one with poofy hair) and Daniel (the skeleton patterns) were always meant to be extremely closely linked in the narrative! I drew the two of them together/side-by-side many times. Below I provide some of the earliest examples :)

The premise of the R.I.P Squad is that each of the characters are trapped in this transformation curse. Elaine becomes a ghost and Daniel becomes a skeleton. Elaine goes by she/her pronouns and Daniel uses they/them btw. The curse manifests whenever they are confronted by a situation triggering their worst insecurities/forcing them to recognize suppressed internal issues. So in the story there’s a heavy emphasis on symbolism and the importance of having support groups.

I don’t have any current plans for their storylines, but I wanted to re-draw some old artwork of them together for the sake of the season! October only comes once a year after all :)

So I don’t know if I’ve openly stated this directly here or not yet—but I’ve been trying to grind this entire week for college transfer prep. Essentially this means my community college expects me to apply to a four year institution in order to continue my education plan. I’m not anywhere near graduation (that’s next year), but typically four year colleges need to be sent your art portfolio and application MONTHS in advance. So they can discern if they want to let you in or not. I’m about to start my fall classes which means I won’t have a lot of free time to work on my art portfolio or submit my transfer. Which is why I’ve been working so hard on practicing realism, environments, and self-portraits lately.