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Fanart of Thimblerig's gorgeous fic-podfic, Tongues. Set right before Sand Sea, as Wu Xie spirals and coils.
Watercolours, coloured pencils and white gouache, 9 x 12 in.
Late at night the idea came to me, and I started a couple initial studies. I needed to capture the snakelike spark of Qin Hao's eyes.
Which led to this sketch, which I love on its own. It has very nice depths and planes. Qin Hao's cheekbones are divine, it was a pleasure to study them.
The audio does a wonderful job of conveying the unsettling slope towards 'not quite all human within a human body(voice)'. So it got me wondering how a visual would do that. And then I saw one of those pictures with the light effect and wondered "what if the light is a snake, and it was stealing his voice".
Then I spent 3 whole days about where to put the streak of light and how many would there be. Bless be my very patient art beta, hobo and Arie, and cheerleader mumble, who have the patience of trees as I sent them about a dozen pictures of this with slightly different angles for the light, or with and without the smoking hand, moving Xiazi, etc. Thank you for encouraging me to keep trying!
Finally, I had a lightbulb-moment that instead of drawing-erasing constantly, I could just cardboard my own window to artificially create a light streak and move the canvas around. It was much faster and allowed me to test angles efficiently. Eureka!
Then it's just layers after layers after layers.
Tutorials on colour works taught me to take pictures of a work and switch them to black and white on my phone from time to time, to check my values rather than get lost in hues. Doing this as we go makes it so much easier to adjust contrasts as needed.
In the story, the walls are covered in newspaper, and it opens with Hei Xiazi in the process of cutting coupons. I initially thought of finding newspaper articles, but then I realised I wasn't sure in which country this story took place, but it certainly wasn't one I knew the language for. This made it dicey to find newspaper articles of the right time period, that I could copy well enough, without knowing if the article I was copying had sensible information. So instead I opt to use the coupons idea and have Wu Xie lie on them, as if they were strewn on the bed and he was laying over them.
Then as I was looking up ideas of coupons in some of the languages spoken in the fanwork, I realised I could poke further fun at the DMBJ franchise if I used its own product placement. I used one of the fanwork's own paragraph translated into Sanskri and German (thank you mumble for the translation!!). The initial transposed writing was actually clear enough to read, but after a couple passes with the brush they all became fuzzy in the end. Oops.
This is the computer-compiled reference for the ads / newspapers / translated paragraphs that went into the background.
This one is taken the night before, since I spent the evenings of about 2 weeks (and 2 holydays) working on this. I often finished at midnight with most of the house lights closed, while the stove light made everything look yellow.
This is the before-last progress shot, as I was setting the last details. Doing the water droplets was surprisingly easy, way more than doing them digitally would have been. Use a glob of white paint where we want the drop to be, wait approximately 30 seconds for the contact point to dry, then gently lift off the paint from the sheet using a clean, dry brush. It's a bit finicky to get at first but it will produce an instant drop. :D
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