Series of drawings based on "the corpse bride"

Unreal to Surreal...

The corpse bride is a movie in which all the characters and places are dark and “odd”. They have usually big eyes, and very small lips and nose, so the part which really stands out in their faces are definetly the eyes. The movie is a “animated cartoon”, yet the characters seem pretty real and the scenes are very misterious and “realistic” (i mean in some parts of the movie it is made in parts that of course could never exist, that´s why it uses some surrealism, but in other parts, the places look real, and they could easily exist or have existed). What I decided to do was combine the fake characters as in cartoons, with real ones. Transform to surrealism, having some parts not real, and some real. So I did the face in a way in which it looks real, even if the shape is not.

So firstly i drew the fictional character and then i drew a real person, and finally combined them both, making the ficional character to look real.

I made all three drawings in pencil. An example of an illustrator I also used for “inspiration” was Benjamin Lacombe, which makes odd – peculiar characters such as the ones that there are in this movie. They all have the same style, a dark one with, big eyes and small nose and lips. I thought it woud be interesting to see how would these characters look in real life. That is why i transformed a cartoon or a fake character into a surreal one. One that has real elements but combined in a strange and unreal way. One of the most important thing in these drawings was to create a good shadow. That's what the characters of the movie are all about. Combining shadows/darkness with lights. A contrast between these to elements was fundamental for this project. I think it also has a symbolic meaning. I worked with transforming into surreal. Surrealism is combining the real things with the fake ones, the truth with the things that are not, dreams with real life. The movie has all of these things. The main thing about it was a dead woman getting married to a living man. There are things you can not mix, it is impossible to mix the living and the dead. There is a barrier between those two states. If not life would never end and death wouldn't exist...

So in the movie basically the main subject is to join the worlds of the living and the dead, which technically is absolutely unreal or surreal (depending on our beliefs). So it would be like mixing the unknown with the known things, the real with the unreal, the darkness and the light... So to conclude the shadows and the lights would represent the contrast between these two worlds, yet how sometimes they can actually get a little mixed together. Life is nothing more than a perception, depending on what we believe we can make our lives real or surreal. If we believe for example in ghosts, it's not very unrealistic if we saw one, this way we are combing two worlds that "can't" be joined together. This final drawing of the realistic cartoon, would be "a perception that i could easily have", I might believe that surreal things can happen. From my point of view life is not totally realistic, sometimes very odd things do happen, things that makes us question whether it is possible for unreal things to happen in such a realistic world. Things that makes us wonder and question about how truly well do we actually know this world. We are torn in the middle of two worlds, a world were limited things happen, and one where limit doesn't exist. There is only so much we don't know.