My Ideas: My First Actual Creations

Again, we have the standard disclaimer. This isn't my first creation, but this is the first major one, not just a chalk drawing, etc. It's also the one that took out an early chunk of my social life, possibly traumatizing me for life. But getting over shit like that is one of the reasons for my blog, so let's focus on the positive; the creation itself.

The year was 1987ish. I was 8 or so and had recently moved from the quaint but apparently doomed small town of Broadview to the much nicer but vastly preppier town of Darien. Not that I had any idea about any of that at the time. I was just a weird introvert new kid. That...didn't really change over the years, save maybe for the "new" part. But I got along. At any rate, as things developed, I took a minor game by some of my friends at the time into an early creative obsession. I mean, as creative and obsessive as one can get when one is 8, but you get what I mean.

I have no idea who named the thing, so I'll take credit for it. I called it a "bite bug." It was basically using your hand to emulate a bug; the fingers were legs, and so on. In theory, the game was to pretend to fight them, using other things like the standard finger gun. In practice, I was the only one to give a damn. Even at the age of 8, after all, most people were already getting too cynical about this sort of play.

I saw it less than a game, anyway, and more a source of inspiration. It was more a matter of finding an artistic medium, and more importantly one with limitations so blatant yet so easy to work around, than a game to me. I began to create a more elaborate backstory for the bite bugs, including their powers. The default, one, for example, could form a nearly invincible shell when attacking (by making a fist, obviously.) The concept expanded from there, and many of their minions and allies were often humanoid (by making a human form with the hand, using the index and middle finger as legs.) I decided that they attacked other races and altered them, turning them into biological weapons. One particular brutal example was a human wreathed in fire (one hand in humanoid pose, one behind to make "fire" effects.) That was pretty dark stuff for an eight year old.

So what happened to the bite bugs? Well, there are positives and negatives. The biggest negative, sadly, is that an early obsession with this sort of thing and video games helped cost me a friendship at that age. To my surprise, this proved a much harder entry to write than I expected when I first listed the ideas for this blog. It reminded me of those times, and what could have been. So I guess that's lesson one I learned from these creations. No matter what your age, if you're artistically inclined, you will be prone to obsession. You will want to create, and focus on the details, and expand your plans, and tell the world about them. But there are times you can't, and times where you have to learn to live as well. After all, life is our first inspiration for our art, and without it, we wouldn't have anything to start with.

The idea for the bugs became a part of larger ideas, even ones too invested for this blog. As time passed, I of course realized that there were elements I couldn't use for "serious" settings, including their name and the most obvious visual element used in their designs. Still, they inspire me. For example, in my Dungeons and Dragons group, which I'll discuss in a later blog, the PCs are facing a race of insects called the Infernal Swarm. Their soldiers are simple brutes known only for the shells they can form to roll over and crush enemies, but they also are known for capturing samples from the population and adapting them into new, living weapons. And, when I started making new forms suitable for the setting, I relied on an old method that lay dormant for years. After all, every artist needs a hand every once in a while!