January 17, 2023
I’ve always admired world building – often daydreaming of what it would be like to build a complex world. Worlds like in the Lord of the Rings, Nausicca, Hellboy, or Avatar (curious whether you think I mean Last Airbender or James Cameron’s Avatar, lol).
It’s so much harder than it looks though. That being said, welcome to my broken world of tomb raiding, dungeon hunting, adventure junkie nomads sprinkled with Gachapon trees.
In the past, I’ve attempted to create a comic dedicated to this cobbled together world. However I soon came to the realization that writing comics is just not in my blood. It started to suck the life out of me rather than give me joy like painting snippets of narrative do.
If you’ve followed my work in the past, you’ll recognize that the girl in The Ivory Beetle is Adelaide – my beloved heroine who adventures out into the world looking for rare items and artifacts. She was birthed from my love of collecting video game items. I’m not at all a hardcore gamer — nor do I play games anymore as a matter of fact. But when I did play back in the day, I was more enamored with the stuff I could get in-game than I was the story.
In this particular painting she’s just found a rare Gatchapon tree, a mythical tree in this world of mine, that bears fruit with the likeness of capsule toy containers. The especially rare trees only bear one fruit which contains an ultra rare object to be coveted by all. Once the fruit is plucked, the tree then withers away and dies.
I actually had a difficult time thinking of what would live within the capsule. I thought for quite some time — would I just paint a star in it and let it be vague? Should I paint a rare sneaker to incorporate some pop culture? Or should I place a shiny pikachu within the capsule to drive home the idea of rarity and collectability?
Ultimately as I continued painting and processing, nostalgia took a hold of me and brought me back to my middle school/highschool days playing Ragnarok Online. I spent hours with friends hunting the Golden Thief Bug in hopes of it dropping the rare Golden Thief Bug Card. It was like a 0.01% chance for it to drop and wielding the card would nullify all magic spells inflicted upon you (or something like that).
So as an homage to that distant time ago hunting for that rare drop, I decided to place a glowing Ivory Beetle within the capsule.
There we have it. Adelaide deep within an Ethereal Orchard moments from plucking her latest rare find, The Ivory Beetle (+10 Nostalgia).