This piece of artwork represents my deeper feelings behind the issues touched on by the Digimon cartoon and the conflicts Renamon has to overcome in the show. For more details on these conflicts, check out my commentary on my first version of this drawing, "Renamon, a Digimon in Digital Paint". Renamon is my favorite character from the show Digimon, a Japanese anime cartoon about sentient computer programs that learned how to synthsize proteins to exist as living creatures in the real world. Despite her human-like intelligence, Renamon, an attractive looking fox creature, gets treated as a mere fighting-animal and is told that her purpose in life is nothing more than to kill other Digimon. On top of that, the government felt that Digimon were not even living creatures at all and went on an indiscriminant killing spree trying to wipe them out. Faced with all of this persecution, Renamon has an enormous task ahead of her: she needs to find out what her purpose in life and to prove to her owner that she is something more than a savage animal. Eventually she proves that she is a devoted and caring companion to her owner and they develop a mutual respect for each other.
Maybe this comes from my reletively lonely background as a computer nerd, but I feel that the concept behind Digimon is a great idea. Because humans are essentially social creatures, it causes them great pain to be left alone for long periods of time. Unfortunately, many people in this world are alone because their is something undesirable about them, whether it be their ideals, their pursuits, or their appearence. Wouldn't it be great to have your own companion who is intelligent, devoted to you, sensitive to your feelings, and able to look beyond your cosmetic appearance? People today are so miserable to each other that maybe an artificially created sentient companion is just what the world needs. It's a shame that inter-human relationships have degraded to the point where we look outside of are own species to find love and compassion, but that is the reason behind why many people own pets. A Digimon, who can speak and is more than capable of having human feelings would go beyond what any pet is capable of: replace (and be equivalent or superior to) a human companion. This idea may sound a bit radical to some people, yet I bet that those same people wouldn't want to go out of their way to help solve the problem of human loneliness by saying "Hello!" to some of the people they have been ignoring over the past few years. Unfortunately, the artificial intelligence technology needed to create sentient computer companions is many years off so this solution is still not an issue, but it is still something to dream about.
In my drawing "From Computer Code to Creation" I was trying to illustrate two different things: The first thing this drawing is Renamon's transition from dead lifeless computer code to a living, breathing, and feeling individual. The other thing I tried to protray in this picture is what lies behind the consciousness of all people: no matter how sophisticated and beautiful we all try to appear on the outside, we all still have some dark primal animal feelings and emotions lying underneath. Renamon may be evolved from computers, but the idea is still the same. Underneath her warm and fuzzy exterior lies her deep primal insides: cold hard machine code. Whether or not we control our primal insides or let them control us is a choice that every individual must constantly make.
This drawing is one of my most ambitious drawings to date. Not only did I color it digitally, which was an experiment for me in itself, but I used a mask and three separate raster layers with transparency to achieve the desired effect. I used a mask to create the top raster layer, which contained just my hand-made ink line art on a transparent background. I used this layer to overlay my original bold black ink-lines on top of all of the other digital effects when my drawing was finished so that you could still see Renamon's outline clearly over everything. This was the first time I have ever attempted anything like that. The second layer contained the same ink line art as the first layer, except that on this layer the character was painted, re-touched, and had lighting effects added. Only the dead white space was made transparent. The bottom layer is nothing special, just a flat black background that is immune to the coloring, re-touching, and lighting effects used on the second layer. All three of these layers combined make up a unique drawing that couldn't have been accomplished as easily by using only one layer.
If you would like to see the difference the top layer of inked line art made take a look at the differences between the outlines of Renamon's two eyes. On the "normal" eye the extra line art layer is present giving the eye a bold black outline. On her glowing eye however the top line art layer was removed. You can only faintly see the outline of her eye on the second layer because the glowing light effect is overpowering it. If the line art layer was still there the black outline would be on top of the light effect, instead of behind it. My top line art layer also allowed Renamon's outline to be visable on top of the circuit-board effect. By using multiple layers I was able to achieve effects not possible otherwise.
The pencil work was done on 80lb. Strathmore medium-surface drawing paper with a Sanford Non-Photo blue pencil. I then inked it with size 05 and 03 ZiG Millennium pens. It was then cleaned up, darkened, and colored in Jasc Paint Shop Pro 7.04.
All text and original multimedia is © 2002 Daniel Keller. All other information is copyrighted by their respective owners.