Fanart: spn_reversebang(3) - The Winchesters Strike Back
Art Title: That's No Moondor, it's a Space Station
Prompt Number: 1026
Artist: cassiopeia7
Fic Title: The Winchesters Strike Back
Author: viviansface
Fandom/Genre: SPN,SF, Fantasy
Pairing(s): Gen. Sam Winchester, Dean Winchester, Charlie Bradbury
Rating: G
Warnings: None.
Summary (requires Flash):
Artist note: It's safe to say that I'm a Star Wars freak. Have been since childhood, and spent my formative years drawing Han, Luke, Leia, Chewie, Lando, and various X-Wing fighters. Almost since Day One, Sam and Dean have read as "Luke and Han" to me, but once Dean called Charlie "Your Highness", I knew what must be done. Thanks must go to my lovely author viviansface, who nabbed the original prompt after I'd begun to despair of it ever being claimed, and took off running with it. Not only was she a lifesaver, she was a joy to work with, too. She took the prompt and added all sorts of happy-making tweaks and surprises along the way. M. made the original prompt her own -- the only thing I asked of her was that Dean get the chance to fly the Falcon, and she complied with a scene that is totally Dean. Plus, she's a genuinely nice person, and wonderful to work with, too. :) So thank you, bb, it was a pleasure! Thanks also to my tireless beta quickreaver, who continues to inspire, encourage, and push me to do better. (NO thanks go to my scanner, which keeps distorting my colors like there's no tomorrow.)
Finally, thanks to the spn_reversebang mods for herding us cats leading this challenge to a successful conclusion. Y'all rock!
Original prompt:
Art contains story spoilers.
“It took you longer than I’d expected,” the boy says. He’s wearing a black robe resembling Darth Maul’s . . .
“No one touches my hair, laserbrain.”
“You fly this thing. Me and Charlie figure out how to destroy the station. And then we destroy it.”
“What - I don’t know how -“
“Figure it out,” Sam cuts him off.
“Where’s Chewbacca when I need him?” he mumbles to himself as he sits down, trying to figure out how to fly this damn thing without blowing them all up.
“Damn,” Sam whispers, “Sometimes, I amaze even myself.”
“Man, you need to stop stealing my lines. It’s not cool.“
“May the Force be with you!”
[References, procedures, babbling, and the like.]
I've seen the three "good" Star Wars movies an obscene number of times, but nothing made me happier than to queue 'em up yet again as research for this collaboration. AND the soundtrack albums came out too, because you bet your butt my arting playlist for this one was all John Williams and the LSO, all the time. In other news, I still lust after Han Solo.
References and resources are from all over the place, from screenshots I nabbed from the movies, to general internet stuff, to Fontspace, which had the actual Star Wars fonts, and of course, there's starwars.com, which saved my bacon, as I'd planned to do the credit crawl myself, if in a series of still images.
Original prompt shenanigans:
Charlie was (still is) a pain in the tuchis to draw -- the first version of Princess Charlie was a weird combo of Felicia Day and Carrie Fisher:
Meh. Still don't like her here. :( IMO, Felicia Day is right up there with Jensen on the drawing-difficulty scale.
Original banner sketch:
Bwahahahaha, I actually intended to hand-letter it, ahahahaha.
When sanity took over, I opened the TESB logo in GIMP:
. . . and after three hours of cussin' and layering (and layering and LAYERING) and erasing and tweaking and scaling and cussin' and re-spacing and shearing text (dear God, shearing!) and cussin' and mouse-throwing and cockatiel-scaring and keyboard-pounding and thoughts of tossing computers out of windows and more cussin' . . . and finally, a bit of (digital) hand-drawing after all. Oy.
And finally . . . THANK YOU, JESUS GIMP!
The spacing is off between "The" and "Winchesters," but there's only so much that can be done
when replacing a six-letter word with an eleven-letter one that must fit into the same space.
Final banner, pre-digital magic:
Original sketch of the encounter with Tony.
Came this, which changed yet again in the final version:
. . . Sam came out a bit too much "Anakin Skywalker" for my taste.
More digital deviltry:
Charlie and her lightsaber in-progress, bad lighting, As my crappy scanner rendered the blade and WTF is that
bad angle, crappy cell pic and all: puke-green outline?
Meet Charlie's new digital lightsaber. (I did the same thing with Tony's lightsaber.)
Not perfect, and I'm not sure it's worth the effort put in (four layers for the blade, plus a bunch of futzing around with Gaussian blur (and there was MATH involved, damn it, to get the glow just right, as the instructions I found were severely lacking), but it'll do. Looks a crapload better than the scan, anyway. I'm destined to be a hybrid conventional/digital artist, I guess . . .
Photo refs:
. . . yes, please.
I would PAY to see Jared wearing this.
The last time I played a videogame, the controllers really did
look like this.
. . . alas, I still cannot draw Charlie properly. Sorry Felicia. (And Jensen, and Jared.) :(