[dripik]

It was about time I started a thread for my non-OW stuff. I know, there's the Exchange Alien thread, but I want to keep that one solely for the comics. This thread is where I post the rest of my drawings.

To start with, I present to you the first piece of a Utopian-Dystopian Illustration series I recently started. The series itself was mainly inspired by a course I took up this semester, which, surprisingly enough, is concerned with Utopian and Dystopian fiction. There are some awesome novels in the schedule, so I'd say there will be more illustrations to expect.

So, here's the first image, featuring the Fourth Book of Gulliver's Travels, where the protagonist stumbles upon an island belonging to a society of horses.



A brief quote from the book, just to introduce the background of the image:


“What you have told me,” said my master, “upon the subject of war, does indeed discover most admirably the effects of that reason you pretend to: however, it is happy that the shame is greater than the danger; and that nature has left you utterly incapable of doing much mischief. For, your mouths lying flat with your faces, you can hardly bite each other to any purpose, unless by consent. Then as to the claws upon your feet before and behind, they are so short and tender, that one of our Yahoos would drive a dozen of yours before him. And therefore, in recounting the numbers of those who have been killed in battle, I cannot but think you have said the thing which is not.”

I could not forbear shaking my head, and smiling a little at his ignorance. And being no stranger to the art of war, I gave him a description of cannons, culverins, muskets, carabines, pistols, bullets, powder, swords, bayonets, battles, sieges, retreats, attacks, undermines, countermines, bombardments, sea fights, ships sunk with a thousand men, twenty thousand killed on each side, dying groans, limbs flying in the air, smoke, noise, confusion, trampling to death under horses’ feet, flight, pursuit, victory; fields strewed with carcases, left for food to dogs and wolves and birds of prey; plundering, stripping, ravishing, burning, and destroying. And to set forth the valour of my own dear countrymen, I assured him, “that I had seen them blow up a hundred enemies at once in a siege, and as many in a ship, and beheld the dead bodies drop down in pieces from the clouds, to the great diversion of the spectators.”

I was going on to more particulars, when my master commanded me silence. He said, “whoever understood the nature of Yahoos, might easily believe it possible for so vile an animal to be capable of every action I had named, if their strength and cunning equalled their malice. But as my discourse had increased his abhorrence of the whole species, so he found it gave him a disturbance in his mind to which he was wholly a stranger before. (...)
- Jonathan Swift: Gulliver's Travels (Book 4, Chapter 5)"