SPN_J2 BB - When the Devil Came to Pluto. Art Masterpost

[amberdreams]

This year's spn_j2_bigbang I claimed a Western J2 AU, because the summary sounded like so much fun. I was right! I was chuffed to learn the story belonged to tsuki_no_bara, as I hadn't worked with her before. So this meant lots of new things - so exciting!

Click on the banner  or HERE to read the story

There were so many interesting characters and so many visually pleasing scenes in the fic I'd have liked to illustrate, but sadly the timings of the bb mean artists don't get a huge amount of time, and mine ran out very quickly!
Here are my finished pieces:
The town of Pluto

This is a composite made from two different drawings. Here's the town buildings on their own.

I thought it would be fun to try some gifs, so the next two are (slightly) animated.
This is the scene where Jared sees Jensen take off into the night, using a burning brand to light his way.

Next, Jared and the herd of ghost ponies. I'm not really happy with this, it didn't turn out like I wanted but it is what it is.


And lastly, here's Jared and Jensen by their campfire.


Process!!
All the creations were a combination of traditional and digital.
Here are the traditional drawings for each piece.
First the two drawings of Jared and Jensen that I used in the last picture, done with Koh-i-nor sanguine pencil.


I used two overlay effects on that final picture; one is from Pack 19 by_sirius_sdz, which gives the effect of a fire between them, and the second was a NASA Hubble photo of cosmic dust. I then digitally painted the background and highlights of the fire on their faces, added colour dodge yellow and multiplied shadows to creat the fire effect and sparks. I then used those layers to create the gif.

Here's the town drawing number 1 before I changed Funeral to Richings on the last building.

I used a composite of several photos of Western towns for reference, and then, because I'd stupidly done the townscape too near the top of a page, I drew the town sign separately then mashed the two together in Photoshop.

The pic of Jensen climbing over the rocks was done entirely without references, and I used ink pen and watercolours. Stage one was drawing Jensen and the rocks in ink, then giving it a wash of watercolour paint.

Stage two was adding more colour with watercolour pencils, then washing over that with water to blend it.

Stage three was all digital, adding shading and shadows and the flickering light.

Lastly, this was my first ghost pony idea.

Done in a hurry on my iPad but I actually like the pony on this much better than the ink wash versions I tried this morning.

Here's the ink wash version. I then drew Jared with sanguine pencil and fineliner. Not at all happy with it.

Comments

[bflyw.livejournal.com]

It's tricky. You want to encourage them... and you don't want to step on anyone's toes, you know?
I think my way of dealing with it has been to post more and more about the process I go through when making my art, so that other people may get some ideas how they can do stuff....easy stuff like matching the lights on the elements, softening the edges so that it doesn't look so cut and paste, soften it with texture at the end to blend it all together etc - typical errors that a lot (and I mean a lot) of manippers do in the beginning. I was lucky to have photoshop in my education, so I've had about 250 school-hours in photoshop (3 months of photoshop 20 hours pr week + plus homework in photoshop on top of that), where the teacher taught us how to soften the edges etc, otherwise god knows how I would have made my manips...

[amberdreams.livejournal.com]

Yes, I find process stuff very useful - and i've used some video tutorials too, though I haven't done any of the techniques often enough to fix them in my head. I need to check every time for a lot of things!