Tanis is a podcast about a strange place and even stranger events, with mystery and Lovecraftian undertones. When I binged the first seasons in my shop, walking the short distance back to the house in the dark was an interesting experience. While I would recommend listening to Tanis if you are a fan of the genre, this is about an idea I had to put my own “spin” on one element of the show.
There are dangerous things.
Without giving too much away, here is what inspired me – one verse, basically.
“There are magical things.
There are wonderous things.
There are dangerous things.
We get what we deserve.”
Now, the idea was to work this sentence into a deco piece, and I wanted to make a mechanism that would return one of the three words from the first three sentences (magical, wondrous, dangerous) in combination with the static rest of the text. I started with the idea of a roller, then switched to a wheel-of-fortune-style thing. You can see some of my thoughts and process in the sketch.
The style for the whole thing was pretty set early on, going for an abandoned fairground vibe with distressed paint that would once have been bright and happy. To hide the mechanism somewhat – although the wheel would protrude on both ends – I considered doing a molded miter frame that would also add to the design.
This is an unusual sketch because for now, I have decided not to pursue this Tanis project further. This happens more than you might think – an idea that sprang from a game, a book or, as in this case, a podcast, can lose momentum quickly when I get “out of touch” with that medium. That does not mean that all is lost, but for the time being, I probably will not tackle this one. Then again, who knows? If I ever come back to it I already have something planned, and who knows, maybe it takes as little as writing about it to get me fired up again. Until that time I hope that this sketch inspired you!
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