Xena in a Strange Loop.

This Xena fan art is based on story of one of the episodes of TV series Xena: Warrior Princess (XWP) titled Been There, Done That (Ep2 of Season 3).   

The story 

The plot of this XWP episode can be seen as the parody of 1993 film Groundhog Day with a twist of Romeo and Juliet. 

The 3 protagonists: Xena, Gabrielle and Joxer, are trapped in a town in which the day is repeating itself over and over, and Xena realizes that she is the only one who's aware of the situation. Gabrielle and Joxer simply don't remember what happened yesterday or the days before.

Xena is also aware that she has to find out the reason for this excruciating time loop in order to break it. In the end, Xena figures out that the cause is a "Romeo and Juliet" type of tragedy: a young man and a young woman from two feuding families fall in love. Without any hope of being together, the girl decides to take her own life. The boy doesn't want to lose the girl so he pleads with Cupid (God of love). Cupid cannot revive the girl, but grants a wish to the young man -- tomorrow (the day the girl dies) never come. So the girl's last day starts to repeats.

Xena then manages to save the girl with her chakram, and the time loop finally breaks. Tomorrow is a new day! 

The impossible waterfall  

For my fan art, the key point is the time loop in the story. Hence, the core element of my fan art is the "impossible waterfall" -- the paradoxical waterfall that keeps flow in a circle. The waterfall is not part of the XWP story and does not appear in the TV show. I just use it as the visual metaphor for the time loop (the repeating day). 

I borrowed the waterfall design by CJ Edwards from website https://www.moillusions.com/impossible-waterfall-optical-illusion/. 

A simplified version of
a impossible waterfall.

It's a simplified version of M.C. Escher's famous lithograph Waterfall (which in turn is inspired by Roger Penrose's Impossible Triangle).

Waterfall by M.C. Escher

With such a pre-exist design of vision illusion, it becomes easy to visually describe a time loop. "Time is like a river." One thing common between time and a river is the one directional flow, thus a contradictory loop of waterflow is perfect match for an absurd loop of time. 

I titled this fan art Xena in a Strange Loop. 

Strange Loop is a concept proposed by Cognitive scientist and philosopher Douglas Hofstadter. In his famous book Godel, Escher, Bach, Hofstadter gives many examples of the strange loop, including Escher's artwork Waterfall. He further elaborated the concept in another book I am a strange loop.  

Hofstadter's books cover broad topics including music, art, Zen etc., but I think the discussion are mainly about mathematics, consciousness, and artificial intelligence. 

My understanding of Hofstadter's ideas are very superficial. However, I am curious whether the "repeating day" in the stories of Groundhog Day and XWP Been There, Done That can also be considered a strange loop. In such a plot, the strangeness come from the  protagonist's memory. 

 

The brook in the woods: vertical lines and curves

My earlier work that explores the design aspect of landscape digital painting, 

also a balance between realistic and abstract representation. 

林间流水话曲直 

The brook in the woods

I did this piece in 2018, painted with Wacom pen (Intuos Small) using Photoshop. The painting is based on a photo I once took in a small park in Toronto ⇩.

The photo I used for reference

The photo is quite dull. But I was attracted by the early Spring scene: the brook, the bridge, the woods, and the winding road. I believe I can make a good painting with these elements.

My first attempt was a very realistic digital painting that I did with ArtRage, using its color pencil tools. ArtRage does a superb job at simulating different art mediums, be it oil painting, water color, or pencils. I enjoyed the process very much during painting. 

I draw one with ArtRage, not too different from the photo.

However, I felt inadequate when looked at the finished work. It's basically just a simplified version of the photo, even though it got the appearance of an art drawing due to the simulated texture of color pencils. 

One advantage of digital painting is that it's quite easy to start over again. That's what I decided to do, and this time with Adobe Photoshop. Photoshop, with it's versatile brush tools and many other features, offers more flexibility. 

I wanted to put more efforts to design this work. For the new version, I paid more attention to the overall composition than the painting details such as brush strokes, texture, or value of colors.

I decided to make the painting more abstract, but not too abstract that it become unrecognizable. To do this, I retained the major visual elements from my reference photo: the brook, bridge, woods, etc. But I played up with two basic shapes: vertical lines and S-shaped curves. 

One of my sketches

I played a little, just to enhance my composition. For example, I added two pairs of Canada geese on the road, and a car with the driver raising her hands. I wanted to create the visual elements that emphasize the curves and vertical lines.

 

Finally I decided to keep the geese and get ride of the car to make the painting simple. Geese are a familiar sight in the Spring, blend well in this painting.

Pair of geese

The Brook in the Woods, the final work: