Alley in My Memory

This picture was created based on my memory of the alley in front of my childhood house. The alley was a located in the old Guancheng town of Dongguan City, Guangdong Province, China. There was an old longan tree growing inside the yard of the house, which is the one in this picture that blocks the sky. The alley was demolished in 2003 when the city decided to build a new CBD in the area.

Although the art skills used in this picture was unremarkable, it successfully captured the atmosphere of the location. We didn’t have any photo for the alley, so this picture became the only reference of the place when my relatives tried to remember it.

At the time, I thought about expanding the idea into an urban fantasy project. My hometown had a long history going all the way back to the Neo Paleolithic times. It would be a fitting setting for a project like that. It would be called “Feng Lai Alley (The Phoenix Alley)”, which was an actual alley that gave the area its name. The demolished area was once a small hill, most houses were built on its slopes. The alleys connected to each other like a maze. The According to local folklore, a phoenix once stayed on the hill for a while. The hill once had a Taoist temple with a stone tower to take advantage of the phoenix legend. The old town uses a phoenix as its symbol and built a stainless phoenix statue on the location of the now demolished temple.

However, if I decided to use a real location, I had to draw human characters. I could not do that at the time, and I was still trying to escape in anthropomorphic animals and robots. On top of that, I was unable to create an enticing concept. The Chinese urban fantasy genre had been milked dry already at the time, and my life experience was too little to bring new things to the table. So the idea was shelved. In 2024, the idea got revamp into Spirit Animals in Disguise.