So this year I participated in the spn_j2_bigbang as an artist.

Title: Steam
Artist: mithborien
Medium: Ink + Digital



The story I created art for is:

Steam by bellatemple

MASTER FIC POST
"Hell and Earth are empty. Do you think Heaven still has room?" The demons are gone, but at what cost? Sam and Dean make their way through a post-apocalyptic America, adapting the Impala and themselves as they go. It's a world of ghosts, mad men, and Victorian science, as Dean discovers he's a better mechanic than he has any right to be, and Sam that he has more power than he'd ever thought possible. They eventually make their way back home to Lawrence, only to find out that things aren't nearly as hopeless as they might've thought. The world can be fixed, all they have to do is make an impossible choice. A steampunk look at Supernatural, guest starring all the usual suspects, with an odd cameo by Samuel Colt and a leather-bound journal.

(Initial thoughts after reading that summary were: STEAMPUNK FTW! *comments to claim fic*)


THE ARTWORK






CLICK FOR BIGGER IMAGES

Notes: So, the above images are basically inks aged up in Photoshop. First, I got a couple of reference photos of the net, traced (I can't draw faces from real life and have them look like the people they're supposed to so tracing it is) them up, added all the necessary steampunk additions and copied them onto watercolour paper. I then got out the inks and started painting.

Initially I had planned to do both Sam and Dean entirely up in inks like I did the Impala but after finishing the Impala I remembered that inks don't come with an eraser nor Ctrl-Z and that I hadn't really done any hand-completed art for over six months. So I wasn't quite game enough to try their itty bitty faces in inks in case I stuffed it up and had to start again. So Sam and Dean remained black ink outlines but we do have the Impala in all it's pimped up, steampunked glory. Although I am quite happy with how the screaming Sam face came out.

And the reason why the inks change colours so much is that I couldn't be bothered mixing up a solid colour to work with. I just kept adding in more red or blue or green to some yellow as I went. Which was totally a stylistic choice to represent the need to adapt in an ever-changing steampunk landscape and not at all because I'm lazy. Totally not lazy.

I then inked in all the black lines (except I used a black pen for the faces because I knew I would stuff up with a brush) and the text. The text is excerpts from all the exorcism rituals they used on the show. What that symbolises within the context of the story, I am not sure but I sure as well wasn't translating anything else into latin. I used the typefaces Aquiline Two and Dear Theo as a guide but I painted the text to make sure it retained that hand-written look

Next I scanned the images into Photoshop. The parchment looking background was an image I had created previously to be used as stock so I just copy and pasted that in. I then darkened the background up in a few places, darkened and upped the contrast on the inked parts and did some overall colour corrections and voila! I was done.

Sorry, if I babbled on a lot. Years of having to write rationales for all my art/design projects will do that.


THE EXTRAS






Notes: These are just a couple of extra images I created for the actual story text: the title image, paragraph divider and an 'end' (that will make sense in the context of the story). The typeface for the title is Times New Yorker. These were created in much the same way as the artwork. Some of the text and images done first in inks, then scanned into Photoshop and played around with in there.

~

And now I can go read all the other Big bangs without feeling guilty that I hadn't completed my own...