I started with secondary research; I looked into mythology first, because I have an interest in it and I know there are a lot of myths concerning the day and night. While I know I don’t want to make a loops based on a myth (I want to be more imaginative than that), I think it’s useful to look into them to see what kinds of stories are already formed about the transition between the day and night.

Secondary research on day and night

I first looked at a myth from Japan; the story of the goddess Amaterasu and her brother, Tsukuyomi. I know this myth well since I studied it previously for a project before University, so I thought it would be a good starting point. Amaterasu is the goddess of the sun, and Tsukuyomi the god of the moon; they once ruled the skies together, but after Tsukuyomi kills another goddess in disgust, Amaterasu becomes disgusted by him and runs away every time he’s around, refusing to be with him. This is why day and night exist separately; Amaterasu doesn’t want to see Tsukuyomi. I find the concept of the sun and the moon avoiding each other interesting; I never envisioned their relationship as a hostile one. Without personifying the sun and moon i think an interesting concept would be two things that can’t exist together; one must exist in the day and one in the night alone, or it could cause some sort of a conflict. A quick idea I thought of was some kind of secret agent, villain or hero; their daytime persona couldn’t exist at the same time as their night time persona, or their privacy wouldn’t be protected. I think it could also be funny to have the sun personified as some form of a sun god who has a crush on a moon goddess, but she doesn’t like him back, so she always avoids him and leaves when he confesses his love. Nonetheless he tries every day, resulting in both a loop and the change between day and night.

In Aztec mythology, there were actually 4 different gods who became the sun god, and there was no moon at first. The 4 sun gods all ended up dead as a result of feuds between the gods, and so when the forth one died, other deities were afraid of becoming the sun god because they could suffer the same fate. The world was plunged into darkness; the gods knew they couldn’t leave the world like this, so they held a vote for who would be the next sun god. Two deities were chosen; Tecciztecatl and Nanauatl. One of these two would have to sacrifice himself by jumping into a pot of fire and becoming the sun. Tecciztecatl was too afraid of the heat from the flame, so he hesitated jumping in; Nanauatl, however, didn’t mind, and jumped in with no hesitation. Tecciztecatl, with his pride hurt, jumped into the flame right after, leaving the world with two suns. The gods didn’t like this, and threw a rabbit at Tecciztecatl, dimming him and causing him to become the moon. He grew angry at Nanauatl, and began chasing him every day, creating the cycle between day and night. I thought this myth had a playful air to it, and could be the base of a funny story; something about the sun chasing the moon, or attempting to catch up to it somehow but never being successful, while the sun taunts and mocks him. Picturing the sun and moon as two beings with a rivalry could spiral into an interesting animation.

The last myth I’ll look at is from Mesopotamia; it’s about the sun god Shamash. During daytimes in our world, he travels through the sky, illuminating the world, but when he disappears at night he travels to the underworld, serving as the sun there before returning to our world the next day. I found this myth interesting because of the concept of travelling between worlds; although I’m looking at day and night, I don’t want to confine myself to just that, I want to stay open to other ideas. I think a loop that visits two separate worlds or places, possibly through a character, would be an interesting one. A character travelling through portals also sounds fun; maybe to a different destination or just instantly jumping through portals.

Next, I want to look a bit into things that happen in both day and night; either occurrences that oppose each other or the way both times of day affect one individual thing. An obvious one is we as people; some of us are active during the day and go to sleep at night, while some of us live mundane days and are more active at night, whether that be through clubbing and partying or scrolling through your phone at 3AM. Another small example of time affecting one object is plants; they open up in the day and face the sun, but they curl up and close at night. Something simple like this could be made into a loop, but it sounds a little boring in all honesty.

There are different animals around in the day and night too; people, birds and dogs are all around during the day, taking advantage of the daylight, while things like owls, foxes and cats (somewhat) are out at night, sneaking around and using the darkness as a disguise. I think this could be something fun to explore in a loop, but I really hate drawing animals in all honesty, so I probably won’t go with that, at least not for now. a cool idea would be someone being active and productive in the day, getting progressively more tired and eventually slowing down at night, recharging for the next day.

Exclusive to night time, I think dreams would also be fun as a concept; sometimes people have reoccurring dreams, which could be presented through a loop, and sometimes people have odd and nonsensical dreams. There are also nightmares, or sleep paralysis; more sinister happenings at night.

Something I wanted to connect to day and night is shadows; whether they play a minor role in whatever I choose to do or not, I think they’d be a cool addition to it. There’s obviously already the connection that shadows are casted during the day when it’s light and distort as days progressively grow older, so if I don’t want shadows to take centre stage in my project then they can be an after thought. However after looking in a bit deeper, I think I’ll probably end up forgetting about shadows in the long run unless they und up a focal point in the loop.

Going back to shadows, i think secondary research on shadows would be kind of boring; we all know what they are, and there hasn’t really been much mythology surrounding them outside of tales of creepy disappearing shadows, and i don’t like reading scary things. Instead I’ll do some primary research, looking at how I can manipulate shadows and make them more interesting.

I started off by manipulating a shadow of my hand to make a rabbit. I think the way shadows can take any form is pretty cool and it could work well as a loop concept.

i also find it interesting how shadows are able to follow the light no matter where it goes; light can’t exist without shadows, just as the sun can’t exist without the moon and day can’t exist without night.

I looked lastly at how shadows can be distorted and change in shape. Shadows closer to the light source will appear bigger and sometimes more blurry, while shadows that are closer to the surface they’re casted on to will appear smaller and more clear.

All in all, I think shadows are a cool concept because they can travel and morph to a seemingly endless degree. They also tie into fate, which I was looking at; they’re fated to always follow the light, existing only where light does. I think they’d be cool to work with, but I don’t know if I’ll go with them as an exclusive final concept; in all honesty I don’t know how much fun I’d have drawing only silhouettes, but I think I could take some creative liberties and make them more detailed, so that I could produce some more fun and imaginative pieces of art.

With the basic fragments of my idea down (light, darkness and shadows) I’m ready to make a moodboard for my project. I hope to gain some visual inspiration through this moodboard, as I think it will be easier for me to connect my themes visually; by the end of it’s creation, I want to have more of a solid understanding of what it is that I want to create.

This was the moodboard I made. I tried to make it half day and half night with intersections between the two placed more into the middle, such as eclipses and shadows. I stopped with this moodboard (which is why it looks half done) because I felt like while it was a good start, it didn’t really communicate everything visually that I wanted it to; I want to include more shadows, because I’ll probably end up going with them as a main theme, possibly not even doing night and day. I added more images to this moodboard to make it more interesting, and this was the result;

This was my final, more fleshed out moodboard. Seeing some of these images led me to new ideas and inspiration; I looked at ways people have personified shadows, and they range from quite sad, wanting more than they have, to more mischievous beings taking advantage of their ability to travel, to malicious and evil beings with more power than shadows in the real world have. These finding helped me to form some more quick ideas, like a shadow repeatedly changing in shape, or a sad and lonely shadow attempting to interact with humans. I also looked at some things that I hadn’t already considered as themes in my moodboard, straying away a little bit from my light and dark theme; I looked at some fantasy and magic images, as I liked the aesthetic commonly used for these things. I also looked at cosmic bodies such as planets and stars, as these things can often be linked to light and darkness in some way, orbiting suns and having one or more moons.