Polly the Clone
Yesterday Dennis came over again, and once more told me that I should go ahead and do another quick photoshop sketch, kind of like the one I did of the monk boy in my last post. He said I should draw my character concept for an upcoming game of Diaspora that we’ll be playing soon, so I did!
Polly comes from a system named Andy’s Left Foot, a very boring system with one homeworld where they are one of the technological centres of the cluster. The upper class rules with an iron fist, but the planet is overrun with people and pollution, so the upper class likes to get away as often as possible. As such, they are known as the cluster’s Tourists. Anyone who can afford it, mostly the cream of the upper class crop, can make clones of themselves to take care of their business while they’re on vacation, sometimes for years at a time. Sometimes the rich make clones of themselves just to do the work they don’t want to do, but which would be too improper to hire someone else do for them. When the Primes come back from vacation, or the clones wear out, they are recycled back into the system.
Anyway, Polly was one of these clones. Her Prime (the person she was cloned from) was a high-level politician of some kind, and as such Polly was taught all the things her prime knew during Escalated Development. However, she managed to slip through the cracks during the behavioural conditioning and cybernetic imprinting process, and found herself with her own free will and ambition, something that was supposed to be suppressed and stamped out. Being probably the fiftieth clone of this important person, she wasn’t really watched much, nor was she important, making it possible for her to coast through her duties until she was able to engineer a plan to escape.
So, she escapes, and spends her life on the run, jumping from ship to ship, system to system. Her lack of hair makes it difficult, since that’s a sure sign you’re a clone, so she wears a lot of bright make-up and ghastly wigs to try and disguise that fact. Thankfully, fashion in the cluster is such that this makes her blend in rather than stand out.
Here she’s in her room, alone, crying over a love she lost tragically just a little earlier. Clones have no hope of developing any kind of relationships with people, let alone falling in love, so the experience really affected her a lot. All she wants is to live her own life, though a rogue clone is one of the most dangerous things to the people of Andy’s Left Foot due to the knowledge they would hold of the important individuals and their doings. The are hunted down like plague dogs.
Polly isn’t her real name. Indeed, as a clone she wouldn’t have a name, probably an identification number of some sort. I figured Polly was fitting, though, since it is a popular name for parrots, something that copies/mimics others. Since that’s a clone’s entire purpose, I thought she’d be the kind of person who would allude to that fact when choosing a name for herself.
Right… so, yeah, sketched up in Photoshop and inked and coloured there. Again on my laptop. I made another animated .gif to show the different layers of sketch, ink, colour, etc.:
Again you’ll see a blank box; click on it to see the animation. =)
It’s been a long time since I cel-shaded anything, so please forgive any sloppiness or blazing errors you might find. It just takes practice, and I am rather happy with what I came up with in this picture, especially on her face. =) Though I probably should have chosen different colours… the colour scheme is exactly the same as that Monk Boy picture; orange, red, and purple. Oi vey. Ah well! It still looks neat.
I have to head to class now. Enjoy!