Porcelain

Here's my entry for *dantesgirl’s huge OC contest. Her characters have the most dynamic personalities—and since I love characters too dearly to put into words, I just had to enter! And contests are always great because they inspire me to be less lazy…

Anyhow, I—I’m not totally sure if I got her character completely right. The last passage of her character description just got me wondering, though … there’s a part of Mimi that she hides from others. She adapts to the people around her (to fit in? Probably; almost everyone does it). She seems like the type that would act one way and feel another. She’s supposed to be superficial, but I wondered … is she really? If there were a hidden unhappiness beneath her surface, or even just general discontent, what would it look like? Because I’ll tell you now, having to hide parts of yourself from others is a miserable job. But wait, how do I know there’s even a hidden side to her? Well, this might be quite a stretch … she has these beautiful porcelain-faced dolls that she only brings out when she’s alone. It seemed metaphorical—either that or someone is digging too deep

Now I’ll go ahead and explain the symbolism behind all those dolls! As the shelves of dolls in the background go toward the light, they become more like normal, gently smiling, pretty dolls like the kind in your grandma’s old cedar chest. But the dolls closer to Mimi show off her superficial personality traits, like her selfish and attention-hogging ways. And even in this drawing of her, she still refuses to show her feelings outright on her face … instead the doll she holds, her hidden side, must do it for her.

The colors are also symbolic: yellow is associated with the past and blue with the future. Why? I was thinking about light bulbs, actually! Incandescent (yellow, round) light bulbs were the first created and give off that warm yellow light. However, newer versions of light bulbs (fluorescent and LED type ones) give off that odd, whitish-blue light. Whenever I think of the future, the light I imagine is always that cold blue color. So why include the past and future? Well, I imagine that this version of Mimi is from the beginning of *dantesgirl’s story … so then what does the future hold for her? Who knows! The light is too blinding to see it clearly

Edit: The contest is over now ... this piece won first place Thanks to everyone for their support and to *dantesgirl for hosting the contest!