Chapter 4: On The Rainy River

This was definitely my absolute favorite sketch. As I had already mentioned, when I began sketching for the first chapter, this was my original idea. I aimed at basically making it display the word: OVERWHELMING. I felt the first chapter was full of emotions and the threat of war but not nearly as much as On the Rainy River. 

I had always heard people talk about how the get goosebumps when they hear about something or someone and that had never ever happened to me until I read this. Vulnerability is the foundation of this chapter and revealed a whole other mental and emotional dimension. I felt like the story and Tim O'Brien's secret could go on and on forever because maybe no matter how much he wrote about it, it would still never be enough to ever fully describe how he felt in the very moment he opened the life-changing letter.

As I kept reading through the chapter I instantly thought of the story of Pandora's box (the very little I know of it that is). I had heard about this particular box being opened unleashing all that is negative, impure, sinister, dark, painful and the list goes on. I felt like this chapter was a list of so many wild emotions that Tim O'Brien could to handle as well as endure because everything just happened so rapidly. In one second his whole destiny was written out for him; his life would never be the same. 

I did my best to sketch different faces with various expressions from rage, horror, to evil laughing (anything creepy). I wanted it to have movement as the faces start from one corner of the page and get smaller in size as they came down diagonally into a little box. At the bottom corner it has words such as  cowardice, numbness and self-pity.

This was definitely my favorite chapter as well as the sketch. I then surrounded it with different pictures of the war that were black in white , like a collage and a frame to the sketch. The black of these little pictures gave it a better contrast to the white of the page and the pencil drawn faces.