Art Masterpost for "Sleeping Beauty" by septembers_coda

[brightly_lit]

Art Masterpost for “Sleeping Beauty”
fic by septembers_coda
art by brightly_lit
Rating: Soft R—the sex is all off-page, mostly metaphorically described.
Characters: Sam, Cas, Dean, Garth
Pairing: Sam/Cas
Genre: Romance, angst, case fic
Word Count: 6,800
Summary: Set in late Season 7, but no real spoilers. When Sam mysteriously falls into a deep sleep while working a case, Dean is desperate to find a way to wake him before it’s too late. Can Cas, currently crazy as a loon, help? Dean isn’t sure he wants to let Cas do what he claims will do the trick…




septembers_coda asked for art from me for one of her stories for a Christmas present. I was actually a visual artist before I was a writer, so I have experience, but after a couple of awkward attempts to make some fanart, I felt utterly unconfident about it. We’re buddies irl and I knew she would be supportive no matter what I turned out, so I happily accepted the assignment ... especially since I really love the story she wanted the art for, “Sleeping Beauty,” and I felt like it had a lot of potential for great visual elements to work with. I’ll be talking a lot about the fic in this post, so if you want to read it without being spoiled, now’s the time, and here’s the link! Then you can come back here and read about how I did the art.


The story takes place in S7--crazy!Cas and all--but Sam finds himself in a hazy dreamworld of a deserted place from his past: Stanford. So the first thing I did was find some pictures of Stanford so I could set it there, and I learned a lot about the school! I attended three universities--yes, three--before I managed to get a degree, and visited several more before I picked one, so I know from college campuses. Yet, Stanford is in a class by itself, unlike any other I’ve ever seen.

Its architecture is a mix of styles, mainly “California mission style” (which is heavily influenced by Spanish colonial, so far as I can tell), but in terms of color of the buildings and recurring visual themes (like rounded archways), it not only looks unlike the typical college with gothic architecture and ivy, but it’s also one of the most visually consistent campuses I’ve ever seen. Only one of the colleges I went to was really beautiful to look at, with not necessarily the same style for every building, but a generally consistent color palette of red stone or brick with ivy and lots of surrounding greenery, and even buildings with very modern architecture are designed to blend nicely with the adjacent buildings. In fact, it’s more to my personal taste than Stanford, but I’ve got to say, based on pictures and testimonials from alumni, Stanford has got to be one of the most carefully and beautifully designed campuses in the world. Check it out!





Located in Palo Alto, it’s got palm trees and very blue skies--again, not my thing, but it is a lot of people’s. The university has a beautiful, storied, even rather (Winchester-appropriate) tragic inception--check out its Wikipedia page if you want more information. I could really picture Sam there, especially since it’s a university with highly involved students who love the place and there are lots of fun traditions and activities; it would have drawn Sam in and given him a WHOLE other perspective on life. Even the weather and the surrounding and internal natural beauty of the campus would probably have seemed like paradise to him; I can certainly see how he would have returned there in his mind when under the influence of a djinn (though Dean would be very upset to know it, since yet again, Sam’s very favorite memories are of being AWAY from his family).

The first image I did came together surprisingly easily--the same one that’s used in the banner. I found a picture of Sam (technically from S8, but since in the fic he’s sick, dying, I liked using an image of him sick and ~30 years old, as he looks in the fic’s present, yet finding himself in a place from his past) where he looked appropriately confused, overwhelmed, and troubled. Then, conveniently, scanning through the Stanford images I had, I found that one with the archways where the place appears deserted and Sam would be in shadow.





... Which leads me to the next image, of Cas sitting in the Rodin sculpture garden (more on that shortly). Stanford is blue skies and bright sun. You know what’s NOT blue skies and bright sun? SUPERNATURAL. And Vancouver! Paging through still after still from the show, not only could I barely find an image of Cas in direct sunlight; I could hardly find an image of sunlight at all in the whole series! It’s page after page of grim night and indoor scenes, and the outdoor daylight scenes are usually dreary with rain, or at least overcast.




Still, I just had to put Cas in the sculpture garden, since he’s so much like a sculpture himself: still and unmoving and otherworldly, appearing human but something else entirely. I really wanted an image of him in his trenchcoat standing among the sculptures like he was one of them, but I couldn’t find one where the perspective and the angle of the sun would be right. I like the image I ended up with quite a bit, but I still wish I could have done it as originally envisioned.

So yeah, sculptures by Auguste Rodin are scattered around the campus! Is that awesome or what?!



And finally, the creepy baby! Yeah, that image creeped septembers_coda the fuck out, but I can’t see it as creepy, since I spent nearly the whole time looking at a picture of a very cute baby I was trying to figure out how to make creepy! The eyes are mainly what did it, but it was a significant challenge to figure out how to make cute baby into something not just terrifying but reminiscent of a djinn. One idea I had was that background, which is actually a picture of the djinn’s hand from “What Is and What Should Never Be,” glowing while touching Dean’s face, taken out of context and distorted so you can’t tell what it is, just that it looks dark and appropriately djinny.

The baby was the image that gave me by far the most trouble. Initially, I had no idea how to make djinn-like tattoos and then make them look glowy blue without it looking totally lame. I tried all kinds of crazy stuff that would make you laugh (so it’s good that I never saved those images! ... or, at least, I think I didn’t ...), but in the end, I just ended up drawing those tattoos on its face, using the djinn-hand background as a model (let’s just say I developed a GREAT deal of appreciation for the work the makeup artists put into drawing those tattoos on the djinn actor, and for the actor for sitting through what must have been an incredibly time-consuming process--I recommend you take a good look at the beautiful, unique designs, many rather minute, in a still from that episode, such as the one below), added in a few pixels of various shades of blue, then did some blurring and smudging and the like so it looked like it was really a part of the baby. Then I put in more pixels of blue in the kid’s eyes, and voila! Evil!baby!


A little bonus Dean h/c for you! You're welcome.

Now, because my image manipulation program is old and was free, it doesn’t have certain functions like Photoshop has that would have come in VERY HANDY, like the way it can outline the main figure. Alas, my program cannot do this. It’s limited, but considering it was free, I’m pretty pleased with what it CAN do. Nonetheless, I had to do all the outlining by hand. On the plus side, doing it by hand, I had multiple stages of control (I had to do it by hand for Sam and Cas, too), but in fact, on the djinn-baby image, doing it by hand ended up helping. The baby was on a white background, which made the process of trying to erase everything around him way harder, because in my program, when you’re outlining and you erase part of the background, it ends up ... white. It was very hard to tell what I was doing. I kept accidentally deleting parts of the baby, then trying to bring them back without bringing in any of the white background ... until I realized a monster baby would be disproportionate and creepy-looking, at which point my inability to perfectly show only the baby with no background outline actually became an advantage, because it made it easy to give the baby weird, creepy proportions! Like so:





Oh, and part of the reason that image is cropped the way it is is because that baby was wearing adorable red-white-blue diapers! That would have killed the scary, so I had to crop ’em out. ;-)



Finally, the divider image, of an eel! I think my very favorite part of that fic is when Cas dreamily describes Sam’s eyes as "eel-blue." I’ve always adored crazy!Cas, and it was just such a perfect crazy!Cas moment--and a very angelic moment, as well. Humans may have all kinds of negative (and certainly NOT romantic) associations with eels, but to an angel, all of creation is equally beautiful and miraculous, eels being no exception. So I knew I wanted the divider image to be of a “singing-blue” eel, and I set about to find a suitable image.




Turns out there IS a blue (and yellow) striped eel (above). Unfortunately, they’re long and skinny and don’t really curl up in the somewhat figure-eight shape I was looking for. Also, they’re constantly swimming around with their mouths wide open, eager to bite something. Not cute. (In googling eel pictures, I also inadvertently came across pictures of eel bites, and I learned that YOU REALLY DON’T WANT TO GET BITTEN BY AN EEL. I always thought eels were pretty cute ... and then I looked at many pictures of them and, alas, had to change my mind somewhat.) But SOME eels can be cute, right? Unfortunately, eels also like to dig one end of themselves into the sand and sway in the ocean currents waiting for something to come along that they can--you guessed it--bite. Usually it’s their tail end that’s dug into the sand. This eel picture I found has his head dug in the sand, which come to think of it pretty perfectly describes crazy!Cas’s state of mind. It was vaguely in a figure eight, I could make its white stripes blue, and I ended up with the eel I wanted for the section dividers.




And that’s all the art for this fic! I hope you liked it, and I hope you like the fic! Go read; it’s a good one. :-)

Comments

[cuddyclothes.livejournal.com]

I love this post. It's always fascinating to me to learn how the artist creates the art. Not only the design elements, but the thought process. Stanford is one great-looking college!

And yeah, SPN is one of the darkest-lit shows on television. In recent years it's seemed brighter, but only inside. Do they even have sunny days in Vancouver?

[brightly-lit.livejournal.com]

I love seeing the process, too.

I know they have sunny days in Vancouver, because I've seen 'em! But probably not for the time of year when they're mostly filming (fall, winter, spring).

Glad you liked it, and thanks for reading/commenting.