Friday, November 21, 2008

Первый Контакт

This is the first post on this blog, which will just be side projects of a certain nature. This is a series of small sketches that I did just to get a feel for a concept I was playing with. I wanted to do a short story on the russian volunteers in the Bosnian war, and this was just trying to tack down a visual style. 

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The character I drew was basically just this fellow, from a video of russian "Dobrovoltsi" in Skelani, Eastern Bosnia, 1993. One of the most pressing reasons I wanted to pursue this theme for a story is the visuals. The bosnian war was a ferocious civil war that had simply been frozen with the end of the second world war and subsequent rise of communism in Yugoslavia. As such, when the war started, the uniforms, slogans, and even the weapons of the previous war were simply resurrected. Russian cossacks and Serb Chetniks, dressed in the uniforms of their fathers and great-grandfathers, once again looked across the battlefield at Ustashe fighters.  There's a book I intend to attempt to read called "Serbian Sunrise" (Serbskii Zakat) by a fellow called Mikhail Polikarpov, a russian man who volunteered to fight for the chetniks and subsequently wrote a memoir about it. 


More on this later, probably.