Year: August, 2006
Notes: Finished entry for Cibex's contest. The idea was to draw a picture of what might happen after her two characters, Sarina and Murdoch, met.

This was not exactly my original idea. I wanted Murdoch to be running off playfully while Sarina was giggling in the background, kinda showing how even though Murdoch looks big and scarey and evil, he actually isn't. I tend to find thats how it works in real life :P However, I just couldn't figure out how to fit sarina into the distance since I'd drawn Murdoch on a dock.
I spent a long time making a wood effect for the pier, was just about to save my efforts, and wham - power cut (like, for about 2 seconds, and the first we've had in years. It was like someone was deliberately fucking with me). I lost all my wood, and my spark of enthusiasm for that day :/

I then decided to draw Sarina to run alongside murdoch. It was more 'interesting' that way, more to keep the eye busy on the pic. I drew up Sarina in a seperate window, then planned to paste her line art ontop of Murdoch. Unfortunately, she was very small in comparison in the end so I had to resize her (not exactly sure how big she would be in comparison but it seemed she would be a little smaller at least). I resized her line art to be smaller, but found that because she is a long bodied animal and has her legs out at the back, she wouldn't fit onto the canvas unless I made her ridiculously tiny.
So I got her to an ok size, increased the size of the canvas murdoch was on and pasted her. Her legs and front paws hung off the edge of the canvas but I actually liked that look.

In the early stages, I toyed with doing a gorey, bloody, violent scene (my favourite kind) but thought it was a little too obvious for the big scarey beastie to be violent. I prefered to go with the 'appearances are very misleading' angle. Probably not much more original, but I like the message.

Sarina and Murdoch © Cibex