Lost Tales of Kirev

To Draw a Mep

The quintessential character in The Keepers Rise, my main novel project, is the mep. In the book, I describe them as spherical, fluffy beings about third the height of a humanoid, with scrawny arms and legs and fur ranging from bright yellow to maroon. While my artist friends are quite skilled at capturing this vision, my simpler doodles of them have changed considerably since I started conceiving the world of TKR in elementary school.

The first mep I drew was simple and geometric. It communicated general shape and nothing else, with a circular body, straight arms and legs, and an unremarkable smiling face. Without proper context, an adult would assume I simply had poor sense of self. I saw more in my head than there was on the construction paper.

The next ones were about the same, but they had hands, feet, and more unique eyes. They swooped down and back up with caps on top, like chubby test tubes. A solid pupil rattled around inside, giving the drawings a new sense of direction and purpose. These meps could walk, point, and stare at my cursive practice in disbelief.

The fur must have come early on too. I complained that the circle was too simple; when I tried drawing fur, my friends and family laughed that my meps looked like living saw blades. I rounded the tufts over the years and perfected the flicking motion necessary for drawing fuzzy circles with only two strokes. They start long on top and collapse like accordions underneath. This was also the point when I realized how much eyebrows could communicate. 

After that came middle and high school, and pose. I doodled meps everywhere I could, trying new positions and new expressions. I dangled them from periods, stacked them on check-boxes, and slid them down exponential graphs. Ms and As became mountains, Us and Vs were inescapable pits, and Cs and Js looked like perfect spots to curl up and nap. My math teacher came to terms with the fact that my tests would never be doodle-free.

Meps were never meant to have noses, but it took a long time to discover a face that worked without that hint of shape. In the final year of high school, the apostrophe noses disappeared, and the meps gained zigzagging mouths that finally solidified the effect of fur while better filling the space. With personality through simplicity, they dance across the page. Still, one mep you'll always see stands straight, with a friendly, smiling face.