The Fall - SPN_J2 BB art master post

[amberdreams]

The first of my two spn_j2_bigbang artings - huzzah! A multitude of thanks to the phenomenon that is wendy for organising this challenge once again.

This fic, wriitten by the lovely enderberlyn, gives us an interesting twist on the Darkness, and a different version of Season 11. It was a cool story to art for, because it meant I was free to create my own vision of the Darkness, based on enderberlyn's excellent descriptions.

Warnings for full frontal female nudity!

First, the banner - click on the pic or HERE to read the fic! [COMING SOON]

There's a lot of symbolism in the banner, which will hopefully become apparent when you read the story.

In terms of illustration, I was torn between several scenes as I read through the story. In the end, I went with the two images that stuck in my mind the most.
Firstly, the Darkness, walking naked and alone through fields of flowers, killing at a touch.

NSFW!

The second image is Sam-centric. In a world that to him is without colour, Sam fills the bunker with flowers - sunflowers and hollyhocks. I was going to fill his improvised vase with both, but somehow the sunflowers seemed to be enough, so I stopped there.

The only other art I ended up doing was two versions of the same divider, just running with the flower theme.

And that's it! Doesn't feel like much, now I've come to post it...

Process, resources, etc:
The background landscape for the Darkness pic was lifted wholesale from a gorgeous painting I found when searching for inspiration. Initially I'd thought I'd try and paint 'something like it', but the longer I contemplated trying something else, the more perfect this source pic seemed. So, yeah, I cheated massively. But look at it! It couldn't be more right...

Here's the original painting (click on the pic to go to the artist's site)

I cut and pasted the front section to build in more foliage, and added a layer to increase the canvas texture, plus I altered the overall shape of the painting slightly.
This is the photo reference I used for the Darkness's posture - though this model was way too skinny and her boobs clearly aren't real, so I made my Darkness more curvy and realistically shaped (I hope!).

A couple of initial sketches for Sam


As you can see, originally I was thinking of putting Dean in the background, but because in this story Sam only sees two things in colour, one of which is Dean, I thought having a colourful object in the background might take the focus away from Sam. So I left Dean out. now I'm thinking I should have added him after all!

The reference pic for the background was a bts photo which I flipped horizontally then sketched and shaded and fiddled around with until I was halfway satisfied with it.

What else...? Oh yes, I had a think about what Sam would put his flowers in, and concluded there's no way he'd go out and buy vases, he'd look round the bunker for something he could recycle. So I found an assortment of likely containers that the MoLs might have left behind from the 1950s, and came up with this coffee tin.

I think that's just about it. Apart from mentioning that the banner was a flower wreath photo I found on a search, plus a dead wood texture, and that I made the silhouettes using a screen cap reference but making sure to define their profiles because they weren't really visible in the cap.
There you have it. It's surprising how much I end up researching for art works, almost as much as for a fic!