Someone requested a print of the version that I have of this drawing on my portfolio website. In the process of attempting to make said print available I realized that I had no high res version of the image saved and had to dig up the sketchbook with the original to rescan. It’s been a while since I’ve looked at the full page. This is really old, but it’s one of those drawings that I actually really enjoyed making. It’s also one of the few that i’ve done entirely without references.. which is why it’s so rough, but also why I like it so much. So enjoy another old Aubrey and Arienette page, and if you like it, there’s a print available on the cafepress site: http://www.cafepress.com/ursulaviglietta

It took a while, but I did promise a new page on the Aubrey and Arienette theme. I’ve got some other pages of their story I’d like to finish and post, but I make no promises this time. 

I posted Aubrey’s bio last time, so here’s one for Arienette

Arienette is the glue. In a certain mood, sitting on a roof top under the crescent moon, she might confide to you that she is the center of the whole entire universe; if she stopped breathing, if her heart stopped beating, it would all fall apart. And she would state it with such conviction that you might dare to believe it was true. Conviction is a key word for this girl.

Arienette believes in things. She believes that if she kisses her elbow she will turn into a boy; standing in a crowded train station one might observe as she absentmindedly lifts her arm above her head and contorts the muscles this way and that trying to convince that boney point to meet her lips. She believes that whole deal about stepping on cracks and mother’s backs. Confronted once with a four building long stretch of fractured concrete between herself and her destination was more than enough to bring her to tears. Arienette had a good deal of guilt associated with her mother already, her birth had put the woman into a coma, she wasn’t about to risk careless crack stepping.

She was born in New York, although it’s unclear exactly when. Her father had a tendency to forget so they would celebrate it whenever it crossed his mind. She enjoyed this the year she turned seven three times, but when she was ten for four years it began to feel a lot less fun.

It was never made clear to her exactly how her birth and her mother’s coma had coincided, but she believes the one directly caused the other and no one has ever corrected her. Her parents had met on a MGM lot; her father was hired to operate a spotlight and after 20 minutes training proceeded to almost kill the starlet and her leading man by dropping it from the rafters. He was promptly fired, but the starlet took pity on him and assuredly said, “It’s not the end of the world, you were meant for bigger roles.” After that he had them. He was in every movie she ever made afterwards, all three of them. His favorite was The Sea Rose, where the starlet played a stowaway on a navy battle cruiser, dad played sailor #47, and Arienette played in her tiny tummy.

Arienette’s closest confidants are Aubrey and the Raven. She’s pretty convinced that they’re both figments of her imagination and is aware of the lunacy it would take to actually believe in a talking raven and a cherub, even if they aren’t. But she’s glad to have them, they’re much more amusing to have around than real people.

This is an old drawing. One of the first comic layouts I ever did. I sometimes work on little stories about this pair of characters. Aubrey may or may not be Arienette’s imaginary friend, but he’s certainly her best friend. All of the stories about the two of them are about that strange loneliness that even the closest of people sometimes share, rather than filling in the gaps that cause it for one another.

I got a C when I turned this in for class. Newgarden wasn’t much of a fan.

Anyway, I’m posting this because I started drawing a panel for Arienette a few days ago, and I figured this would give it a little more context. I’ll post Arienette’s bio with that drawing. This is Aubrey’s:

Aubrey:
Aubrey is pretty convinced of his own existence, but has trouble convincing others of it. For the most part he walks about unseen and talking to himself. He has the body of a cherub but, much to his dismay, his wings can hardly lift him half a foot off the ground. He wears a pair of WWII fighter pilot goggles at all times, to hide the fact that he has one blue eye and one brown one, also because he thinks it might make it seem like the wings are just another part of the costume.

Arienette claims that he’s her imaginary friend, and that he’d stop existing if she did, but he has some other theories. For a while he thought he might be a ghost. He spent months trying to work out the dynamics of walking through walls, and came away from the experience with a newfound contempt for his own solidity. After a 48-hour sci-fi channel Quantum Leap marathon, Aubrey entertained fantasies of being a holographic entity sent back from the future to guide a leap-er (which should be carefully distinguished as entirely different from a leper or one might be subject to the wrath of Arienette when one suggests that she is indeed the leper one means to be guiding). He and Al had so many things in common (or one thing specifically), like being completely unseen by all except for small children, the mentally “absent”, animals and people near death… oh and, um, Arienette. Arienette’s conviction that she was in fact inhabiting her own body and therefore perfectly content to lie about on the couch and not “change her life for the better”, combined with his previously discovered contemptuous solidity, grounded the Al Theory mere hours after it had lifted off. But he still likes to fantasize about it.

Aubrey is an amnesiac character. He remembers tidbits of details of a past life that could be his. Like the fruit trees that grew in his grandfather’s yard: pomegranate, peach, and lime. Or the color of his mothers best dress. But has no recollection of the people or places themselves. He is ageless. When he speaks you sometimes get the feeling that you are listening to an ancient, at other times a child.