Speech Bubble

A little over two years ago I started sketching on my iPad and thought, “hey, this seems like fun, if only I had some project that would make me keep at it.” A similar project I finished before went through all 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet, so I decided to take the same route, but change the language – and the complexity. Instead of illustrating drawn-out, grammatically-acrobatic sentences, I focused on two characters per letter, the goals being: having fun, trying different styles with the iPad (using a Wacom stylus and the excellent app Procreate), and of course covering as many fandoms as possible.

In the beginning I chose characters pretty much randomly: I just listed all the names that came to mind, picked two that seemed fun to draw or would work well together, and threw them on the canvas. But after I posted B, and someone pointed out that so far there’s a vampire slayer in every illustration, I thought it would be really cool if there was some link going through all the letters. Nothing too obvious, like a small easter egg that only I would be aware of, until the big reveal at the end.

I quickly gave up on finding a vampire slayer for every letter in the alphabet, but since the link so far had been between two characters, I decided to roll with it: a thematic link between every two characters from consecutive letters (A and B, B and C, without using the same character for two different links). Sometimes the connection is very general, like “comic book characters”, and sometimes quite specific. For some characters it came almost naturally, and for others I had to force connections on quite a narrow list of options. I’m proud to say that except for the few impossible letters at the end of the alphabet, I always picked characters solely for the letter I was working on, without planning future links. Handicap, yo!

Here’s the entire series. You’re welcome to go over the letters and try to figure out the links before scrolling down to the table that lists all of them. And you can see all the illustrations in this nifty page my husband wrote for me.

Below is the list of links I had in mind. Did you get all of them? Found others that fit even better? What’s your favourite letter in the series? Tell me everything in the comments.

Cheers!
Aviv

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That’s all, folks! 26 letters down, only 784 days since I started this project. So let’s call it a monthly project and consider me doing pretty well on deadlines!

I’ll upload a nice final post shortly, with all the letters and an easter egg I’ve been keeping a secret all along.

Previous letters

Whoops, missed uploading a letter, so here are both X and Y, featuring a nice selection of geek culture from all over the place. Special guest appearance: Jon Snow unconscious on a horse!

Well well well. Starting to near the end of this seemingly eternal project, where the English language dumped all of its least necessary letters. But I have some ideas for them already, and hopefully I can pick up the pace towards the finale.

Previous letters