Gosh
So I guess Team AU won! Apparently it was ridiculously close though, and I think that's very fair - I admit I didn't keep up with everything that was posted, but from what I did see the standard was equal on both teams. So well done to everyone who was involved.
Anyway, reveals are up, so I guess I get to talk about my piece, finally. My entry was All possible worlds: Five movements in an endless cosmic dance. The version that was posted on the comm was originally posted smaller than intended, so I've reposted it under the cut at full size (and as such, warning: BIG).
The prompt for the piece was the first part of the Pablo Neruda poem, If you forget me. I especially liked the parts about "everything carries me to you" and "those isles of yours that wait for me", so I decided to extrapolate from them and make the piece to do with - perhaps not destiny as such, but certainly inevitability. I wanted the implication to be that however Sirius and Remus find each other and fall in love, they are bound to do it somehow. So in one version of events they meet in the library at school; in another as children; in another, Sirius is caring for baby Harry and Remus is a barista who sells him a coffee, and so on. Ironically enough, once I had a clear idea of how to approach the piece I realised it would have been considerably easier to write than to draw, and I wish I could have come up with an idea that required a single drawing rather than lots, because making this work was stressful in places.
The original idea was to draw things from different "strands" in different styles (e.g. one in pencil, one in inks and so on) but I gave up on the idea for lack of time, and I'm sort of glad I did, since I prefer it all blending together rather than individual drawings being marked as belonging to particular stories (if that makes sense). I made all my original drawings in pencil, intending to colour some later, but ended up sticking with pencil for all of them. However, in reference to this original idea, as well as the colour theme of the prompt and the fest as a whole, I did end up throwing in colour here and there - the bucket, the school ties, the decal on the coffee machine and so on. (I threw that one in there, incidentally, both as a nod to the rainbow theme of the games, and so that there would be an implication in that "strand" that both Remus and Sirius could be read as queer. I don't know if that came across, but that was the idea.)
On a personal note, my favourite drawings are the coffee shop, the sweets, and the kids on the beach. I also admit that the punks drawing, which was the last one to come into my head, probably counts as self-indulgence, since mmm punks and mohawks and tattoos and oh, is that a trail of belly hair I see? :P
In the end, I think I'm pleased with how this came out, although it took me a while to get there - by submission time I hated it with a passion, but I think it's grown on me (I will freely admit that - as some of you will already know - I did think a few bits of the art submitted for this fest were pretty dire, and as a result I've come out of this with a little more faith in any talent I might have). Certainly it's the most ambitious bit of fan art I've ever done. This was my first time taking part in a fest, and it was... an experience, to say the least. I'm not sure if it's something I'd do again, but I'm definitely glad I did it at least once.
Finally, and without wanting this to come across like an Oscar acceptance speech, I want to thank three people: spacefragments, whose help fixing my drawings and my ideas in general was worth more than I can say; evil_underlord for helping me with the title and the text when I couldn't get it right; and o_deanna for providing me with huge amounts of moral support throughout. ILU guyz.