Nur.

“I unroll when I want to, and grandma knows before I do.” He says it, or thinks it, with the ease of a child who doesn't know he's saying something deep. It speaks to this: that he comes out of his shell when he can, not a minute before, and that his grandmother reads him better than he reads himself, with no need to ask. Almost all of who Nur is fits into that one line.

I created him front-facing, at ease, against a flat background: it reads at a glance as you cross the street. What the t-shirt puts on you is that — a calm boy who moves at his own pace and doesn't need to draw attention. In his story, Nur once saw another pangolin cross a path at night, and drew one the very next day; his kind are few and growing scarcer, though he doesn't know it yet. Who he is and what goes on inside him is in his biography; here he arrives light, on a t-shirt. And he's part of a whole family of characters I make myself, Yago Partal.