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Description
There’s another ship nearby; the great liner can see her, a light off to port, southwest, not too far away. The other ship hasn’t moved, hasn’t responded to the liner’s distress signals, but she’s there, and she can help if she acts fast.

There’s not much time left, though. The great liner is mortally wounded, her hull ripped open by ice and flooding fast; it hasn’t been long since the collision, but already the crew are saying her prognosis is grim, that she’ll sink within the hour. Her only hope is the possibility that some other ship - her sister, perhaps - might come along and take her under tow or at least save her people. She can hear other ships over the wireless, including some of her fleetmates and a particularly responsive little ship whose callsign is MPA, but she knows none of them will reach her in time - and she knows there’s someone closer.

She’s tried to reach MWL, the ship who interrupted her transmissions from somewhere very close by just a little while earlier, but there’s been no response. Why no response? Are her wireless operators away from the key for some reason? Are they ignoring the liner’s pleas for help?

MWL is close by; the liner knows she is. She might even be that ship sitting still on the horizon; after all, she’d said she was stopping for the night when she called earlier, and the other ship certainly hasn’t been moving.

Yes, it has to be her, the liner thinks. That hardly seems like a coincidence.

She keeps her gaze fixed on the distant light, willing the other ship to move, to come and save her as she begins to slip under the water. That light and her own wireless set are the liner’s only sources of hope; around her, the ocean is black and flat and empty and so cold. She focuses on the light and on the messages coming in from the other ships, seeking what little comfort she can get from the melodic Morse beeps that let her know her sister is on the way, ready to save her, but she knows, deep down, that rescue won’t arrive in time. Her sister is five hundred miles away; even MPA is still a good distance off. They won’t - can’t - get there in time. The only ship who might be able to help is MWL, and she still hasn’t moved from her spot on the horizon.

Any spark of hope the liner might have left is extinguished when her bridge goes under. Suddenly all she can see is blackness, a dark abyss that seems to stretch forever downward, ready to swallow her up. It hits her, all at once, that this is real, she’s dying, and that endless yawning void is to be her graveyard for the rest of time; try as she might, she can’t stifle a cry of panic as the realization slams into her.

Everything hurts; her wound aches and the water is so cold and there’s a horrible strain on her hull as her bow is pulled down and her stern rises into the air, and although she tries so hard to remain dignified and quiet like she’s supposed to there are moments when she can’t help but cry out. It occurs to her that she’s failing at staying calm just as she failed at the one thing she was meant to be able to do. She’s failing at everything, and nobody is coming to help her. Her power is fading and the other ships are too far away and the only one who could have helped has left her to die and oh god she’s so afraid.

The pain crescendoes, excruciating, in time with the screams of all her people who couldn’t make it to the lifeboats, and she knows this is it, this is the end. No one will save her now, and she’ll die and be swallowed up by the ocean and she’ll never see the sun or her home or her sister ever again. She’ll never again be warm; she’s already forgotten what that feels like. This is it. This is the end.

Somehow the pain manages to get worse, turning into sheer white-hot agony and primal terror as she feels her hull begin to buckle under the strain. Her steel plates begin to rip themselves apart and she screams, she screams a horrible raw scream that echoes across the pitch-black sea and then-

Nothing. She’s gone. The abyss swallows her up; the ship on the horizon stays still.

111 years ago tonight, RMS Titanic sank into the icy North Atlantic, taking some 1,500 souls with her as she plummeted into the abyss. The sinking tore hundreds of families apart, inflicting thousands of wounds that would never heal as countless people lost their loved ones in the disaster. The story still inspires both sorrow and wonder in people today, more than a century after the tragedy, although Titanic’s name has since become commercialized and transformed over time into a synonym for catastrophic failure and romantic movies. This piece is dedicated to all the countless victims of the Titanic disaster: not just the dead, but also the survivors whose lives would forever be shadowed by the event, the crews on the other ships who were involved and had to live with their own memories of that night, and all the people - involved or otherwise - who lost friends and family in the sinking.

Notes on the piece:
-This picture is meant to appear very dark, but if you turn your brightness way up and look really closely at the horizon, there are several icebergs just barely visible against the sky.
-The stars are more or less accurate; Samuel Halpern has an article describing what the sky would have looked like from Titanic’s deck as she sank, and I used that as a reference. Specifically, the stars we see here are to the west of Titanic (with a few from the north and south as well); she’s facing north here in an effort to reach Californian - not the mystery ship survivors saw off the port bow (southwest) as described in the story above.
-Originally I planned to include glimpses of the other layers beneath Titanic’s dress; the idea was that parts of her undergarments (corset-cover, petticoat, corset, either chamise and drawers or combinations, etc.) should be visible as the ice claws have torn through all those layers to reach her skin and then some. However, I realized that in all honesty I don’t know how to do that yet, so I think I’ll save that specific kind of detail for after I’ve practiced drawing damaged clothes a bit more. This is a very important piece, after all, and I don’t want any confusing or poorly-drawn aspects - especially in white, which would stand out even more - to take away from the overall drawing.
-I’m not sure where the idea to represent the iceberg and the overall sinking with a bunch of icy hands, but I’m glad I did it! It was by far the most daunting part of the piece (Californian’s coat was a close second, though), but I think that aspect ended up working really well!
-This is, of course, not literally what happened, nor is it meant to vilify Californian and her crew. Essentially, this picture represents my humanized Titanic’s point of view after the fact; because she knew Californian was nearby as she sank but didn’t know that most other ships didn’t have round-the-clock wireless services like she did, she assumed Californian was deliberately ignoring her distress calls for whatever reason, and this has been exacerbated by Californian’s apparent apathy regarding the situation and lack of effort toward setting things straight. In real life, I don’t believe Californian’s crew deserved the scrutiny and criticism they received in the wake of the disaster, and this piece is in no way meant to imply that they were at fault.
-Deviantart is being mean to me about links in descriptions at the moment, so for the time being there aren’t any links to outside information (very disappointing as I wanted to include the list of the victims’ names). Instead, I’ll simply recommend a few sites I personally enjoy reading: Encyclopedia Titanica, the Titanic Inquiry Project (this one helped me write a paper last semester!), and Samuel Halpern’s Titanic Chartroom. There’s also a really interesting audio documentary on Youtube called, if I remember correctly, “Titanic in her own words” which takes the wireless messages sent during and after the sinking and puts robotic voices to them; it’s very haunting and I really think about it a lot.

Description
There’s another ship nearby; the great liner can see her, a light off to port, southwest, not too far away. The other ship hasn’t moved, hasn’t responded to the liner’s distress signals, but she’s there, and she can help if she acts fast.

There’s not much time left, though. The great liner is mortally wounded, her hull ripped open by ice and flooding fast; it hasn’t been long since the collision, but already the crew are saying her prognosis is grim, that she’ll sink within the hour. Her only hope is the possibility that some other ship - her sister, perhaps - might come along and take her under tow or at least save her people. She can hear other ships over the wireless, including some of her fleetmates and a particularly responsive little ship whose callsign is MPA, but she knows none of them will reach her in time - and she knows there’s someone closer.

She’s tried to reach MWL, the ship who interrupted her transmissions from somewhere very close by just a little while earlier, but there’s been no response. Why no response? Are her wireless operators away from the key for some reason? Are they ignoring the liner’s pleas for help?

MWL is close by; the liner knows she is. She might even be that ship sitting still on the horizon; after all, she’d said she was stopping for the night when she called earlier, and the other ship certainly hasn’t been moving.

Yes, it has to be her, the liner thinks. That hardly seems like a coincidence.

She keeps her gaze fixed on the distant light, willing the other ship to move, to come and save her as she begins to slip under the water. That light and her own wireless set are the liner’s only sources of hope; around her, the ocean is black and flat and empty and so cold. She focuses on the light and on the messages coming in from the other ships, seeking what little comfort she can get from the melodic Morse beeps that let her know her sister is on the way, ready to save her, but she knows, deep down, that rescue won’t arrive in time. Her sister is five hundred miles away; even MPA is still a good distance off. They won’t - can’t - get there in time. The only ship who might be able to help is MWL, and she still hasn’t moved from her spot on the horizon.

Any spark of hope the liner might have left is extinguished when her bridge goes under. Suddenly all she can see is blackness, a dark abyss that seems to stretch forever downward, ready to swallow her up. It hits her, all at once, that this is real, she’s dying, and that endless yawning void is to be her graveyard for the rest of time; try as she might, she can’t stifle a cry of panic as the realization slams into her.

Everything hurts; her wound aches and the water is so cold and there’s a horrible strain on her hull as her bow is pulled down and her stern rises into the air, and although she tries so hard to remain dignified and quiet like she’s supposed to there are moments when she can’t help but cry out. It occurs to her that she’s failing at staying calm just as she failed at the one thing she was meant to be able to do. She’s failing at everything, and nobody is coming to help her. Her power is fading and the other ships are too far away and the only one who could have helped has left her to die and oh god she’s so afraid.

The pain crescendoes, excruciating, in time with the screams of all her people who couldn’t make it to the lifeboats, and she knows this is it, this is the end. No one will save her now, and she’ll die and be swallowed up by the ocean and she’ll never see the sun or her home or her sister ever again. She’ll never again be warm; she’s already forgotten what that feels like. This is it. This is the end.

Somehow the pain manages to get worse, turning into sheer white-hot agony and primal terror as she feels her hull begin to buckle under the strain. Her steel plates begin to rip themselves apart and she screams, she screams a horrible raw scream that echoes across the pitch-black sea and then-

Nothing. She’s gone. The abyss swallows her up; the ship on the horizon stays still.

111 years ago tonight, RMS Titanic sank into the icy North Atlantic, taking some 1,500 souls with her as she plummeted into the abyss. The sinking tore hundreds of families apart, inflicting thousands of wounds that would never heal as countless people lost their loved ones in the disaster. The story still inspires both sorrow and wonder in people today, more than a century after the tragedy, although Titanic’s name has since become commercialized and transformed over time into a synonym for catastrophic failure and romantic movies. This piece is dedicated to all the countless victims of the Titanic disaster: not just the dead, but also the survivors whose lives would forever be shadowed by the event, the crews on the other ships who were involved and had to live with their own memories of that night, and all the people - involved or otherwise - who lost friends and family in the sinking.

Notes on the piece:
-This picture is meant to appear very dark, but if you turn your brightness way up and look really closely at the horizon, there are several icebergs just barely visible against the sky.
-The stars are more or less accurate; Samuel Halpern has an article describing what the sky would have looked like from Titanic’s deck as she sank, and I used that as a reference. Specifically, the stars we see here are to the west of Titanic (with a few from the north and south as well); she’s facing north here in an effort to reach Californian - not the mystery ship survivors saw off the port bow (southwest) as described in the story above.
-Originally I planned to include glimpses of the other layers beneath Titanic’s dress; the idea was that parts of her undergarments (corset-cover, petticoat, corset, either chamise and drawers or combinations, etc.) should be visible as the ice claws have torn through all those layers to reach her skin and then some. However, I realized that in all honesty I don’t know how to do that yet, so I think I’ll save that specific kind of detail for after I’ve practiced drawing damaged clothes a bit more. This is a very important piece, after all, and I don’t want any confusing or poorly-drawn aspects - especially in white, which would stand out even more - to take away from the overall drawing.
-I’m not sure where the idea to represent the iceberg and the overall sinking with a bunch of icy hands, but I’m glad I did it! It was by far the most daunting part of the piece (Californian’s coat was a close second, though), but I think that aspect ended up working really well!
-This is, of course, not literally what happened, nor is it meant to vilify Californian and her crew. Essentially, this picture represents my humanized Titanic’s point of view after the fact; because she knew Californian was nearby as she sank but didn’t know that most other ships didn’t have round-the-clock wireless services like she did, she assumed Californian was deliberately ignoring her distress calls for whatever reason, and this has been exacerbated by Californian’s apparent apathy regarding the situation and lack of effort toward setting things straight. In real life, I don’t believe Californian’s crew deserved the scrutiny and criticism they received in the wake of the disaster, and this piece is in no way meant to imply that they were at fault.
-Deviantart is being mean to me about links in descriptions at the moment, so for the time being there aren’t any links to outside information (very disappointing as I wanted to include the list of the victims’ names). Instead, I’ll simply recommend a few sites I personally enjoy reading: Encyclopedia Titanica, the Titanic Inquiry Project (this one helped me write a paper last semester!), and Samuel Halpern’s Titanic Chartroom. There’s also a really interesting audio documentary on Youtube called, if I remember correctly, “Titanic in her own words” which takes the wireless messages sent during and after the sinking and puts robotic voices to them; it’s very haunting and I really think about it a lot.