Art

[dexfarkin.livejournal.com]

Hey all. These are the last of my very late commissions. If you ordered one, please e-mail me an updated shipping address, and I'll send them next week. Nute, yours will be finished by next weekend, and mailed the following week. It's a tube going grade Z mail, so it might take a bit.

Anyhow, large images of Wanda, Moira, and Kurt ahead.



Okay, confession time. Kids, especially babies, creep me the hell out. I am deeply uncomfortable around them. I have to skip most of the Rachel logs because I get so disquieted and unsettled reading about her. So, when Jen ordered a picture of Moira and Rachel, I held off doing it for as long as humanly possible. It's just... babies. *shudder*

However, in doing it, it turned out much better than I anticipated. This is the one image that I relied the most on media to produce. While most of the drawings have had picture references for the features, I actually had to pull posing out for this one. I decided I wanted something more fluid for it; softer focus. Moira's naturally a hard, flinty type of woman, between her job, her background, and her cheekbones. Babies are all soft and round and squishy. So I tried to play up a much looser, softer piece with the two of them, where the mother aspect is very much the counterbalance to the sharper aspects of her personality.

The technique was to ink directly over the rough pencils, and then colour over both, for a much less controlled image. Almost watercolourlike was my goal.



The third bloody time I've done this damn picture. This was the very first image I did. Pencils done, ready to ink, and Rossi and Jen decide to finally give Strange an icon base using Sam Neill. So, drew the second one. Ready to ink, Dex spills grape juice all over it early in the morning. The next one burned down, fell over, and then sank into the swamp. But finally I got a final image.

The whole magic theme is the obvious underline here. Also, put a bunny in anything and people go 'awwww!'. I refer to this as a magical suburban gothic; both Wanda and Strange are very normal looking. They could be yuppies or something, but instead of working in investment banking, they travel to Nepal to kill the Whatsit Demon of Upshallah. That entertains me a lot.



Finally, Kurt. Orginally, this was a very different picture. My original sketches had Kurt on the SW lancets in the Ulm Catherdal, in the position of the Saint in the window, and the window lit up behind him. It would have been a lovely image, but there were two problems. One, that Kurt would have been backlit to the point that he would have looked demonic enough to represent a corrupting influence, rather than the contrasting one that I wanted (angel that looks like a devil, etc). The other problem was that it was far too difficult to get the stained glass down. I did four pencil roughs and an ink test before I realised the window was about forty-fifty hours worth of work to do properly.

It's a shame, but yeah, the time investment was just not worth it. Finally, I came on the idea of him in the church, reflecting on the window. That way, his face and body are reflective in the image, but his clothes and things are dark. Stripping away to bare the soul inside, so to speak. Thanks to a small tutorial by Aisy a few weeks ago, I was able to find an image of French strained glass to put in, increasing the contrast between the black and white figure, and his faith in the representative form of the glass.

Comments

[deathpixie]

As always, great work. :) I have to admit to enjoying your write-ups as much as the art - mainly because I get sneak peeks along the way. I adore the Strange/Wanda one; the expression on the faces, especially. :)

But the Kurt one is my favourite, especially now the window's there. I love the contrast.

[x-skin.livejournal.com]

Lovely work, Dex, as always. :) Looking forward to getting them.