SPN MiniBang: All the King's Horses Artpost
Title: All the King's Horses
Author: clex_monkie89
Summary: Sam is broken (like Humpty-Dumpty without all the fun). And Castiel's idea of saving Sam (for some unknown definition of "saving") is to rip Jess out of heaven to help Dean try and take care of Sam.
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: Sam/Dean/Jess
Warnings: Broken!Sam, AU from the end of S6.
When I picked this story at the samdean_otp minibang, I didn't even realise that the author had also written a couple of my favourite fics. In this regard I was lucky - and I was also lucky because Clex is not only an awesome author but also a very sweet person - whenever she's actally talking to me, that is. And that's where my luck ends.
You see, this is the part where I squee about the story and tell you all to go read it, but as it happens, I can't. All I can tell you is that what I have read of it looks promising and I'm very much looking foreward to finally reading the whole thing myself.
Circumstances were very much working against this collaboration. Sickness, a wedding, a new job and other things that escape my knowledge kept my author from getting in contact with me as much as would have been necessary. She never got around to telling me what I needed to know in order to create, for example, a banner that actually fits the story, or let me know if she needed any chapter title cards. In the end I had to do this pretty much without her guidance and without ever having read the full story. What I did read of it was intriguing, but still very much a work in progress. As I'm typing this, I don't even know if the story will be finished and posted before the day is over.
On top of that I lost my graphic program and bad luck was working hard to keep me from creating any kind of art for this story. If I manage to create this post without my laptop dying (again), I'll consider it a win.
Banner
This is a last-minute creation that was started and finished yesterday. Since clex_monkie89 never told me what she wanted for the banner and I find curtain-fics incredibly hard to illustrate, this quite generic little sketchy pic was the only thing I could come up with. As of this moment, I don't even know if it fits the story beyond the fact that the main characters are in it.
With time running out and no proper graphic program, I decided to keep this very simple. Jess doesn't look like herself, but then, this was never suposed to be a realistic portrait. Actually, it was never supposed to be more than a pencil sketch. The shading just kind of happened afterwards and I'm not sure if it wasn't a mistake.
This is the slightly less edited version:
Which of course was a bit of a lie. Obviously, the main difference is that one picture has text, and the other doesn't.
Illustration
Now, to make up for the blatant lie above, here's a bit of the sad creation history of the one story illustration I did.
First, I created this sketch based on a scene from the story:
At this stage it was just an attempt to get all the limbs onto the same piece of paper. I intended to create a proper picture out of it using Photoshop, but unfortunately, one year of dragging my laptop through Japan in a backpack finally took its toll and it died - literally while I was working on this pic. That scream you heard ten days ago? That was me.
So needed a new laptop. Unfortunately, with the old one I also lost Photoshop and the progress on the picture. Also, my wireless pen tablet didn't want to be recognized by the new laptop. After a long, hard battle I finally won, though, and tried to make do with various freeware graphic programs in order to finish this.
After two days I finally gave up and decided to do it traditionally, with pencil and paper, and add only a few digital touches afterwards.
So I sat down and discovered that my pencil sharpener had disintegrated when I wasn't looking.
Eventually, I found another one and got the pic done. The result looked like this:
Not exactly what I wanted it to be but not too bad either, I thought, and went to scan it - only to discover that the guys who developed my scanner don't offer drivers for Windows 7.
At this point there were only a couple of days to go and I didn't have the banner yet. Cue panic. I defeated the scanner like I defeated the tablet, though (with a baseball bat) and worked on the pic with limited digital means until it looked like this:
Which I called the finished version so I could move on to the banner.
And then, of course, I created some icons, because that's all part of the package.
Icons
Of course, before I could make this post my computer contracted a virus that very nearly destroyed it. At this point, I'm hoping that my bad luck will end once this art is finally posted and done with.