Illustration "Life Science"

Explaining this work is somewhat complicated. One is faced with the question "where does fan art end and original work begin?". This picture is supposed to be somewhat of a cover for a table-top role playing game that I played recently with four other people, which means that even though it took place within the Doctor Who universe it is otherwise completely made up by the Game Master and the players. I suppose one could say this is fan art of a fan fiction. Consequently, giving full context is a bit harder than it was for my previous fan works on here, so I will limit myself to the absolute essentials.

"Didn't Einstein say 'Insanity is repeating the same mistakes and expecting different results.'"

— "That's the first time you've said something different"

The focus here lies primarily on the time loop aspect of the plot. Throughout the game all choices by the characters where anticipated and manipulated to aid the antagonists scheme. The character depicted, Ari, is at the center of it. By the end he has the power to stop his father (the antagonist) from setting up the lethal situation his friends are in, however this would create a paradox that might erase everyone affected from the timeline.

The other characters are thus trapped in the stop watch in his hand; he controls the time loop and so he has the power to restart the cycle of death, in hopes that the outcome will be different. The chain of the stop watch is tightly wrapped around his arm, "trapping" him in this choice until he breaks the watch and chain to risk the lives of everyone (including his own) — this time in an active way rather than a passive "restart" of the unfortunate chain of events.

I've chosen not to explain the plot in great detail as it is very convoluted, but two other aspects should be mentioned to explain the illustration. Ari was shot in the head, which lead him to regenerate (build a new body). His left hand is glowing orange (a sign of the start of a regeneration as shown in particularly the new Doctor Who show), while his head wound is perpatually bleeding — this is not a fact in-universe, but rather a symbolic choice to underpin the cycle of life and death that this character is choosing many many times before breaking the loop.

Finally about the style choices in general: I've grown to really like working with a very limited color space like this: the orange just made sense in this case, as orange light is factually the sign of regeneration. Pairing it with its complimentary color seemed just as logical and I really like how they harmonized here in the end. The blue very much represents the character's mood, clearly he is miserable about his self-errected prison.
The prison aspect is emphasized by the size and body language of the character: his feet are pressing up to the edges of the image and his back is crooked. The background is also somewhat too small, making him seem a bit large.

I decided early on that I would go for a less anatomically correct approach: of course this is clear by the size of the eye, but also (rather than look to real human models) I drew my concept from memory and used this sketch as a template; which gives this Ari perhaps a more cartoonish appearance than my Christine illustration had previously.

The font, Industria, is the very same font that was used on the covers of the BBC Eighth Doctor Adventure novels in the late 90s and early 2000s. The plot of the campaign, as our GM Jenny admitted, is very much inspired by these books. The silhouette within the title font is my character! Within the stop watch it is seen with its clone on its back.

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