Hi, I’m Erica. I’m a writer and illustrator, and I like exploring new worlds and characters more than anything. I love ideas, stories and art with a twist of irony, mystery and what-if. I also write tutorials on digital sketching and design for the app Concepts, my prime digital art and design tool.
If you’re here, you’re probably creative like me and interested in stuff like sketching your favorite characters, drawing awesome creatures and concept art...
thinking about cool tech and laws of physics and energy…
teleportation, earth life, alien life, paranormal life…
lives on other planes that could touch ours…
what happens when we touch planes we don’t know about or believe in…
existence, extinction, saving our world, traveling to other worlds…
and peering into worlds deep inside ourselves.
Does this describe you at all?
Sweet. Welcome to Eridani, my spot about all things world building, character sketching and concept art.
Eridanus constellation.
Epsilon Eridani is an actual planetary system about 10.5 light years away in the Eridanus or "Celestial River" constellation. Astrophysicists think of it as a younger version of the Milky Way, complete with sun (the Epsilon Eridani star), at least one planet, moons and a dust belt. It's about the same age our system was when it first began to grow life, back when we were still single-celled microscopic organisms.
This means anything could be growing there right now. We grew up. Maybe they are, too.
It also means we can imagine what "they" might be.
Growing stuff.
Do you feel your creative gears whirring? Yeah. This is what it’s like building imaginary worlds based on real ones.
While we create, we're going to explore what “world building” and “character building” are really like. The creative process isn’t clean. It’s messy. It takes research, thinking, sketching, connecting ideas and sketching again to find possibilities (much less solutions that could evolve into... you know, lifeforms).
Design - and life - are iterative.
Iterative dungeon crawling.
Iteration means growth. If you take a single object and let it mature and split into two objects, it has iterated. Each of those objects then has the potential to grow into two more. Very quickly, you have something that looks like a tree.
Life is similar. Each step forward you take, you have to make a decision whether to step one way or another. If you were to look at your decision path from above, and each step had two possible outcomes, it might appear as a simple tree like the one pictured above. Do you go up or down? Left or right? Listen to your mom or dad...
... or option three, listen to your best friend? Often there are more than two options for each decision. There might be a hundred or more. A lot of things like context, history and patterns come into play when deciding your direction. One way or another, you need to decide just one way to step, and discover where it leads you.
Writing and art can help take you to places you can only imagine. Through your creativity, you can explore worlds that otherwise will remain in the dark. You don't really want to stay in the dark, do you?
Come and discover Eridani with me. I know we’ll find some amazing idea evolutions through asking questions, thinking out loud, and drawing new characters and landscapes. I'll share what I know about world building along the way, and you can share with me. Together, we'll imagine Eridani.
Erica