Forever and a Day - spnopera art post

[amberdreams]

No last minute panic here, nope. Me and cherie_morte paired up to deliver a J2 version of Gounod's Faust for spnopera. cherie is posting a bit later on, I'm posting now because I'm going out later. STORY LINK COMING SOON!

The prompt was Faust (by Gounod): Trading his soul to the devil Méphistophélès, Faust transforms back into a handsome young man and the two go off in search of beautiful women and adventure.

Trying again bcause I accidentally deleted half the post. Dammit!

I wanted to do this one mostly in pencil because I wanted that grainy quality - ha! Right. I should have stuck to Photoshop, because nothing seemed to work right. So most of this post is me bemoaning my lack of skill. Just warning you.

I tried a scene illustration

I hate it - the proportions are all out of whack and even the blood spatter couldn't disguise  all the errors - argh!

I'm including this one (murder husbands!! Thanks Chomasiky!) because though it was initially just a sketch idea, it's ended up being the only piece I like.

and I did some shading and blood spattering so it matches the set

I liked how the shading suddenly makes Jensen look wicked.



OK - process/in-progress stuff (beware more whinging):

The title art: Without giving too much away from the story, Jared's face for the title art was meant to show Old Jared and Young Jared.
Here's the first version of the drawing

which I got annoyed with and scribbled over because it was ALL WRONG!! Well, maybe the bottom half of his face is ok, but the rest - just NO.

Which actually looked marginally better but still WRONG. However, there was no time to start again so. This angry scribble was the one I then added the wrinkles to age the right half of his face. I photographed it again, and used this version for the title pic.

The murder scene:
I'd tried sketching the scene in photoshop to get the positions and then used this final idea to draw from in pencil - I think I should have stuck to PS.
Photoshop sketch

Pencil version

So yeah, that's about it. The whole thing ended up being an exercise in frustration, really - though I will hasten to say, no reflection on the quality of the story, which is great!

Comments

[amberdreams.livejournal.com]

God I'd totally forgotten about this! Sadly, I still don't like my drawings much either, they haven't improved while I wasn't paying attention...but I'm sure I'm going to love your story!

Now I need to add the link to this. :D