Today, we have some characters from the Ivory Tower.
The Ivory Tower was/is a concept I'm still mucking with, but as with most of my ideas, I enjoyed the conceptualizing and pretty utterly failed at the execution. The basic premise was the anthropomorphic personifications of academic subjects. The point was to explore the relationships between them. Humanities students don't identify with Math students who don't identify with Art students, and so on. And within the basic houses, there are huge differences.
I once walked in on a furious debate between a History student and an English student about who had to write more papers. The argument was silly to begin with because so much depends on what teachers you have. Some teachers assign 3 papers a quarter, which determine your whole grade (I HATE that, for the record). Others require a page long paper every week. And of course, the KIND of writing is different. While obviously, most English students can and do write research papers, and History students can and (though less often) do write creative works, the emphasis is still very different. But I didn't want to introduce a Quantity Versus Quality dynamic to what was already an asinine discussion.
Engineering students frequently don't relate to Physics students, even though there's so much overlap. Drama kids rarely get along with band kids. The point is, there is a culture to subjects, at least on the university level if not throughout academia, and I wanted to represent it with characters. Of course, all of this is through my perceptions of said subjects, and others have totally different ones, which was why I had wanted it to be a rather collaborative effort, and indeed, got a lot of tips and ideas from various individuals.
So the Ivory Tower itself is a giant...castle/private school. Rather like Hogwarts now that I think about it. It is presided over the rarely seen Polymath and broken into the 3 main houses mentioned above: Humanities, Sciences and Art. Of course, even here, there is some difficulty. The Physikies...Physics, Chemistry, Biology, etc...disdainfully look down on the Softies...Psychology, Anthropology, Sociology (triplets), Political Science and so on, which bounce between Science and Humanities as the Social Sciences. Mathematics and Physics don't get along because they are the two big guys in the little sandbox and they're just alike enough to hate each other and just different enough to not merge into a crazy amorphous blob. No one knows what to do with the art students. Or the philosophy students, but for the most part, they stay out of everyone's way.
So with that longwinded introduction over, here is the first couple Students I worked up.
Statistics is that girl everyone kind of hates, but also wants to be with. Sociology has a huge crush on her, but since they're so often in the same study group, he doesn't say anything because he doesn't want it to get 'weird.' She's the kind of girl who actually runs for the ASC. And wins. Her brother, Mathematics, particularly avoids her because she so often tries to one-up him and twists his words around in knots. She never goes steady with any one person for long and frequently makes rounds among the Softies. Her younger brother, Probabilities is always trying to tag along but he just mucks up her scene and she's always trying to distance herself from him.Speaking of...
Meet Probabilities and his best friend Quantum Theory. Quantum Theory is Physics ginger-step-brother. Literally. But he doesn't let the weird stares or the nearly universal awkwardness and sidelong glances get him down. Probabilities and Quantum Theory hang out a lot, mostly because they get ignored or shunted by everyone else, and because they're a little young, they don't always relate the same way the others do. This, however, leads to lots of (truthfully, hilarious) pranks and shenanigans as they try to get everyone to just lighten up.
Materials: Pencil, .4 fine point pent, Photoshop.
Sketchbook: His Chthonic Majesty Dreams of English Summer Rain
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