"Keep This Secret" Art Masterpost
Fairies! FAIRIES! *_*
The second story I got to make art for in this year's J2-SPN-Big Bang was ellerkay's delightful "Keep This Secret" (AO3, or on LJ here). I have been missing doing fantasy art and this let me roll around in it and stretch my color muscles, as well as work with Elle who is a goddamn delight (and I totally blindly managed to snatch up another of hers for the Wincest BB this fall and am already drooling over the opportunity). This story brings the yummy angst, secrets (I mean... you guessed that part, right?), The Hotness, and long-craved fix-its. There's so much to love, and I definitely recommend you go read and love it. See below for Mah Art and Mah Rambles.
F A I R I E S, Y'ALL
Okay, this OC (Barnabas) is delightful. OC's can be a tricky proposition in a fic and I wound up really loving this little guy and his relationship with Dean. (His arrival on the scene is one of my fave moments in the fic. <3) I was trying to work on my skills at drawing the show characters and wound up putting more love into Barnabas' wings!
Until recently, when I've done fanart for SPN I've been laying a photo of the actor under the drawing so I could mark out the important edges of features and be much more likely to get a recognizable face that way. I'd do the rest freehand, but it was a big crutch and one I've been working away from in baby steps as I've been building my observing/drawing skills back up to where they were before I went on a long art hiatus. Here, I drew from a reference photo and made adjustments incrementally until I had him as close as I could get him that way. Afterwards I did slide the photo under to check out where I was going wrong and not seeing how, and then hid it again to do the fix-it work freehand. IT'S GETTING CLOSER, GUYS.
But Barnabas is all scratch all the time (well--unless the rulers and French curves invalidate that, but I don't think they do), and those wings are probably the thing I've proudest of in any of the art I did for this story. I spent way too much time looking at dragonfly wings and drawing fine little lines and cells (and making them match up and going cross-eyed trying to do all that) and it was fussy work but worth it. I added a layer below that to use the airbrush function for some soft purples and aquas so I could get a tinge of color without getting rid of the transparency, since there's a kind of cellophane quality to dragonfly wings, and used sharper, finer lines in an even paler aqua to give the reflective/iridescent quality. His glowing ball of fairy light is a super large and super low-flow ball of airbrush on a layer of its own set to 'soft glow,' if I'm remembering correctly. (Your terms may vary; I'm using the SurfacePro I'm, er, borrowing from work for over the summer and the free Sketchbook Pro program that came with it. Sketchbook is very easy and intuitive, but also crashes on me like a mofo. But free.)
Oh, I'm also really pleased with the reflection of Barnabas' fairy light in Dean's eyes. <3
Font is Trattatello.
Poor Sam was being totally neglected and I wanted to get more of the lovely spooky fae feels from EllerKay's story in, so I cheated to make it in under time constraints and totally traced Sam's face from a beautiful con photo of Jared that you can and should find here from nothingnessjust. (Jared and the photographer did 9/10 of the work of making that face ethereal and otherworldly.) I can't say too much about the why of this picture without spoilers, but imagine a dream where it looks like Sam until, mid-blink, something shows up underneath. This was more fun with using lots of layers, with the layer containing the antlers and the green body set to be more transparent. I also used a very large eraser that was set to erase very little to thin it out in places, and wound up basically accidentally with a rippling water look to the torso that I'm pretty in love with. I think I used the same tool to thin the flesh tone at the overlap, too. I'm pretty happy with his hair and eyes, too (and if anyone catches a special thing there I will love you for life). The crown was meant to be brass twisted into eldritch shapes, but the metal wound up looking woody which I like just as well, set with emeralds.
The flowery frame/garland was the best I could do after I found out Sketchbook Pro can't use any of the wonderful 'brushes' people make for Photoshop that add lovely floral details (an idea 100% inspired by hellhoundsprey's amazing work). Sketchbook did have a few of its own in some of the free additional brush sets they have (and if anyone is actually interested I will look up which sets), so I played around combining jasmine and bougainvillea I couldn't change the colors of with fireflies, spiderwebs, pine, and a few random fluffy brushstrokes I could. I started it as a flower crown for fun (see below), but hoped I could stretch it around into an accent and still be able to keep the spooky crown, and that worked pretty well, stretched and distorted and semi-transparent. But the flower crown came out awfully pretty and Elle suggested I post it anyway because she has the best ideas, so here's a totally self-indulgent "Sam" in a flower crown.
I got wonderful help and encouragement behind the scenes as always from some of the fabulous artists participating in this bang - Quickreaver, Amberdreams1960, sketchydean, sillie82, and BeeLikeJ. My work is always better when these amazing humans give me feedback.
I adore feedback, and will love you disproportionately to what you give me.