Avatar VS Darkside: Topsfield Fair Entry 2017

I have been submitting my artwork to the Topsfield Fair for the last five years it has run, hoping I could get more eyes on my artwork. Since I haven’t regularly made money off my artwork yet, I enter as an Amateur in the fair’s contest, rather than as a Professional. I wanted to show off and discuss my entries sooner, but I kept delaying it until now. So, as I mentioned last week, for the next few weeks, I will be providing quick write-ups about these pictures.

The first year I entered the Topsfield Fair’s Art Contest was 2017, where I entered this image of my OC Sakura Miyazaki and… herself two more times. Material World Sakura (center) is feeling horribly low, but her inner positivity and inspiration manifest as her Lucid Avatar (left). While she is looking toward the bright side, however, Sakura is still being buried under a manifestation of her inner negativity, her personal Darkside with ice powers (right).

Whenever a Lucid awakens to their abilities in the Dream Dimension, they unwittingly create a Darkside, a personal Nightmare created primarily from their denial, secrets, guilt, and other fun negative qualities. A Lucid’s Darkside may arise within their mind to destroy them during especially low points of their lives, and they often threaten to destroy their host through “self” sabotage, which may manifest in the Material World.

At the time, I was looking to portray Darksides in illustration. What pushed me to make this idea my entry that year, however, was this video from Rebecca Parham (aka Let MeExplain Studios on YouTube) talking about your “Angel” and “Demon” who may appear on your shoulders. Cartoons often portray them as the voices who push you to do good or bad things, but Becca suggests the Demon also represents the dark voice in your head which saps your motivation or your will to live, while the Angel could be your inspiration or reassurance. Just watch the video, it’s good. So is the rest of her content.

At this point, in an effort to simplify character coloring, I was starting to play with the coloring on Sakura in her Lucid form. I tried to make her skirt less “pink” and more “light red”, which… we’ll see what happens in the future. I also started playing with her eye color, going from green to teal, thinking it could fit a bit better with the other more teal-colored parts of her design. One change which stuck with me, though, was making her tights black / dark instead of white.

For Sakura’s Darkside (who she calls “Yukiko”), I tried to go for the color-inverse idea, making her outfit mainly teal to clash with Sakura’s red, and showing her dark blue portions (such as hair) as pale light yellow. I thought I’d give Darksides eyes the opposite color to their creators with white pupils, too. I even have a colored pencil drawing of Yukiko from a few months before (May 2017), shown below.

I also had this idea at the time where Sakura’s hair in the real world is actually black, turning a dark shade of blue in the Dream Dimension.

This drawing was originally made during August 2017 and finished by September 2017. Please comment below to let me know what you think about this picture, and I’ll be back next week with my entry for the same fair in 2018.