Five Year Fanniversary
Jun. 5th, 2010 02:11 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pennswoodsExactly five years ago today, I completed my first piece of Harry Potter fanart. Unbeknownst to me at the time, the subject of piece was celebrating his 25th birthday that very day. And since today is both Draco Malfoy's 30th birthday as well as my own 5 year fanniversary, I thought a little fanart retrospective would be an apt way to celebrate.
2005
I first committed fanart out of boredom. At the end of the spring semester, 2005, I moved from an apartment I had been sharing with with several other people, one of whom was moving off to New York to get hitched, and the other of whom was graduating (waves at![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
hey_its_michael). When taking a break from boxing everything up, I'd been re-reading the entire HP series to that point (PS to OotP), which I had checked out from the local library. At some point, I found a scrap of paper and started sketching out Harry at the pensieve, but I never finished it, and merely tucked it away in a folder while I finished with the packing. I'd never uploaded this sketch before, but here it is:
My first incomplete HP sketch was of Harry and the pensieve.
As you can see from the missing limbs and the erasure marks, I never got around to finishing it up.
A few weeks later, I found myself visiting my DH (then just my boyfriend) in Sweden, where he was coming to the end of his fieldwork. I had armed myself for the trip with several audio books including Order of the Phoenix, which I listened to while flying, doing dishes, during downtime on weekends when there was nothing on tv, and when I went for a jog. Because I like to do stuff while I'm listening to audiobooks, I cracked out a sketch pad I happened to have bought and left in Sweden upon a previous visit and started drawing Draco and finished up my very first complete piece of HP fanart. For some reason, I first depicted Malfoy with a rather ridiculous earring. I don't know that I've ever drawn him with an earring since, but I do find it a bit interesting that Draco was the subject of my first completed piece of fanart.
Note the date in the corner. I had no idea the time that June 5th was Draco's birthday.
Several months later, after the release of HBP and my discovery of fansites, I uploaded this first piece of fanart to ArtisticAlley here. Because I only illustrated canon for quite some time, I would always frame my fanart in black and include the quote and text and page number the scene was depicting.
I used to get comments all the time on my uploaded art asking when I would finish it, and this used to discourage me because I considered my pieces finished. I know they didn't look nearly as vibrant on screen as the colored pieces, but I had no experience coloring before. By the end of 2005, I decided to start experimenting with color.
2006
My earliest attempts to add color to my fanart involved a tablet. There was so much digital art popping up around me, that it just seemed the obvious way to go. Unfortunately, my tools and skills were just not up to snuff as you can see here, here and here, and so I abandoned this after a few months.
Around this time, I got to know the absolutely wonderfulmudblood428 who was forever gushing over her love of colored pencils. She kindly shared with me the brand pencils she used (Prismacolor), and so I tried my hand at coloring my art using traditional media. Because I was absolutely terrified of ruining the sketches, I would scan and print out the fanart I wanted to color on regular printer paper and would color over the copy. This seemed to agree with me so much more than the digital approach. I'm not sure why. Maybe because a pencil is thinner than a stylus, and I felt I had more direct control over what my hand was doing.
In any case, after approximately a year in the fandom, I was coloring!
The first Snape picture I ever drew.
The picture above was uploaded to my LJ in June of 2006, almost exactly a year after my Draco picture. Although I had completed the lineart on this in the summer of 2005, I had come back to color a copy of it with colored pencils. As you can see, although the lines are more precise than in the digital pictures, the colors are really flat and look like crayon, and I had a really heavy hand with the black pencil when trying to depict Snape's hair.
2007
After being initiated into colored pencils, there was no going back, and all fanart I've uploaded since has been in color. My art slowed down a bit in late 2006 and 2007 as I frantically finished my dissertation, applied for jobs and helped DH plan our wedding. (OMG! Crazy times!) I did manage to squeeze out a few pieces of fanart, but I was still frustrated with how flat everything looked.
In addition, sometime in the past year, I'd participated in one of those anonymous fandom memes where people provide concrit on fanfic and fanart. One anonymous commenter critiqued several aspects of my fanart including the paper I used which made my art look really scratchy. Up until this point, for the most part, I'd still been scanning in pencil sketches, printing out the scans and doing my coloring on computer paper.
I was terrified of ruining my precious sketches with bad coloring, but in March, I had a lovely talk withmudblood428 who shared some of her own tips with me on blending colors and incorporating a little ink into her colored pencil work. And I bit the bullet and took colored pencil to actual art paper and followed her advice, which you can see in this piece of April foolishness:
You can begin to see ink creeping in to the folds of their robes.
Due to major life changes which included moving to Texas and beginning a full-time job, 2007 saw a real drop in fanart output. I didn't really have time to create anything new in June of 2007 as all my attention was focused on the dissertation. I resolved to do more in 2008, and I also started fixating on markers, especially black markers.
2008
I have always been a fan ofsigune's beautiful inked fanart especially the way Snape's greasy hair and robes are such a pure deep black. This was something I just couldn't achieve with colored pencils, and so I started relying on black pens when depicting Snape and Harry's black hair or anyone's black robes. I'd also begun using the black, sepia and sanguine colored small nib Pitt pens to line my art and found that the brush sized sanguine pen was the perfect color for Lily's or any of the Weasley's red hair.
The picture "Surrogate Kisses" I did for the first![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
less_for_you (Lily/Severus exchange) shows this merging of ink and pencil.
More and more marker began creeping into my fanart - especially in hair and robes.
In the summer, after attendingani_bester's workshop on watercolor, I tried my hand at incorporating water color as background for my fanart. This necessitated using a much rougher paper, which had an interesting effect on colored pencil and ink. I liked the effect seen here and most especially here, but the paper did seem to absorb a lot out of my pens.
I was also particularly frustrated with the stripeyness of my black and thought a change of paper might help - something much, much smoother. And thus, I purchased my first pad of Strathmore Bristol smooth which really highlighted for me what a huge difference paper can make! Inspired by my lovely new paper, I thought I'd try something different and cheated on my colored pencils a bit.
2009
One of the things I'd observed when participating in big exchanges and challenges, especially those that incorporated both fic and art, was that multi-panel fanart that told a story was particularly well-received. Multi-panel art also seemed like an good way to effectively hit all the prompts in challenges like thesnarry_games where sometimes the genres may only be obvious from a sequence of pictures.
Thus, I began experimenting with some multi-panel art, which resulted in this very silly and NSFW entry for Team AU in thehd_worldcup done completely in ink and posted in May:
Click the image above to go directly to the full fanart entry.
I did have fun with this multi-panel art, but I missed my colored pencils, and I also realized that it takes a certain skill to lay-out images, place speech bubbles, draw straight lines, and work within a certain number of frames to effectively tell a story this way, and that I wasn't sure I had it in me.
A few things happened in 2009 that had a major impact on my fanart since then. The first was that I ran out and bought a few giant copic markers to see if this might help alleviate my stripeyness problem. They're incredibly expensive, but they come in some luscious colors, so I bought more than just my usual black. In addition, while at Azkatraz,tbranch loaned me a piece of art paper, which was half the size of the paper I normally use. Suddenly, it occurred to me that I could cut my 9x12 paper in half or in quarters and not have to spend so much time shading in huge swatches of empty background with my colored pencils. This would also mean I wouldn't go through my pencils and markers as fast and that I could produce more fanart quickly. And that's how I was able to do all this in such a short amount of time!
2010
This brings us up to the present day, where my five year fanniversary and Draco's 30th birthday coincide, which has resulted in another fanart first. 31 long fics and 112 pieces of art were produced for the DracoBigBang to celebrate. I drew a total of six illustrations for three different fics, includingdeathlydragon's The Consequences of Obsession, elle_blessing's Dark Heart Silhouette and lucianwolf's Burning Astoria.
It is the final fic that led to this post regarding a fanart first. I've finally drawn full-frontal male nudity, and it seems rather fitting that it should be the object of my first piece of finished fanart (and his son) who should receive this honor.
Happy birthday, Draco Malfoy. I hope you enjoy your big bang!
2005
I first committed fanart out of boredom. At the end of the spring semester, 2005, I moved from an apartment I had been sharing with with several other people, one of whom was moving off to New York to get hitched, and the other of whom was graduating (waves at
hey_its_michael). When taking a break from boxing everything up, I'd been re-reading the entire HP series to that point (PS to OotP), which I had checked out from the local library. At some point, I found a scrap of paper and started sketching out Harry at the pensieve, but I never finished it, and merely tucked it away in a folder while I finished with the packing. I'd never uploaded this sketch before, but here it is:My first incomplete HP sketch was of Harry and the pensieve.
As you can see from the missing limbs and the erasure marks, I never got around to finishing it up.
A few weeks later, I found myself visiting my DH (then just my boyfriend) in Sweden, where he was coming to the end of his fieldwork. I had armed myself for the trip with several audio books including Order of the Phoenix, which I listened to while flying, doing dishes, during downtime on weekends when there was nothing on tv, and when I went for a jog. Because I like to do stuff while I'm listening to audiobooks, I cracked out a sketch pad I happened to have bought and left in Sweden upon a previous visit and started drawing Draco and finished up my very first complete piece of HP fanart. For some reason, I first depicted Malfoy with a rather ridiculous earring. I don't know that I've ever drawn him with an earring since, but I do find it a bit interesting that Draco was the subject of my first completed piece of fanart.
Note the date in the corner. I had no idea the time that June 5th was Draco's birthday.
Several months later, after the release of HBP and my discovery of fansites, I uploaded this first piece of fanart to ArtisticAlley here. Because I only illustrated canon for quite some time, I would always frame my fanart in black and include the quote and text and page number the scene was depicting.
I used to get comments all the time on my uploaded art asking when I would finish it, and this used to discourage me because I considered my pieces finished. I know they didn't look nearly as vibrant on screen as the colored pieces, but I had no experience coloring before. By the end of 2005, I decided to start experimenting with color.
2006
My earliest attempts to add color to my fanart involved a tablet. There was so much digital art popping up around me, that it just seemed the obvious way to go. Unfortunately, my tools and skills were just not up to snuff as you can see here, here and here, and so I abandoned this after a few months.
Around this time, I got to know the absolutely wonderful
mudblood428 who was forever gushing over her love of colored pencils. She kindly shared with me the brand pencils she used (Prismacolor), and so I tried my hand at coloring my art using traditional media. Because I was absolutely terrified of ruining the sketches, I would scan and print out the fanart I wanted to color on regular printer paper and would color over the copy. This seemed to agree with me so much more than the digital approach. I'm not sure why. Maybe because a pencil is thinner than a stylus, and I felt I had more direct control over what my hand was doing.In any case, after approximately a year in the fandom, I was coloring!
The first Snape picture I ever drew.
The picture above was uploaded to my LJ in June of 2006, almost exactly a year after my Draco picture. Although I had completed the lineart on this in the summer of 2005, I had come back to color a copy of it with colored pencils. As you can see, although the lines are more precise than in the digital pictures, the colors are really flat and look like crayon, and I had a really heavy hand with the black pencil when trying to depict Snape's hair.
2007
After being initiated into colored pencils, there was no going back, and all fanart I've uploaded since has been in color. My art slowed down a bit in late 2006 and 2007 as I frantically finished my dissertation, applied for jobs and helped DH plan our wedding. (OMG! Crazy times!) I did manage to squeeze out a few pieces of fanart, but I was still frustrated with how flat everything looked.
In addition, sometime in the past year, I'd participated in one of those anonymous fandom memes where people provide concrit on fanfic and fanart. One anonymous commenter critiqued several aspects of my fanart including the paper I used which made my art look really scratchy. Up until this point, for the most part, I'd still been scanning in pencil sketches, printing out the scans and doing my coloring on computer paper.
I was terrified of ruining my precious sketches with bad coloring, but in March, I had a lovely talk with
mudblood428 who shared some of her own tips with me on blending colors and incorporating a little ink into her colored pencil work. And I bit the bullet and took colored pencil to actual art paper and followed her advice, which you can see in this piece of April foolishness:You can begin to see ink creeping in to the folds of their robes.
Due to major life changes which included moving to Texas and beginning a full-time job, 2007 saw a real drop in fanart output. I didn't really have time to create anything new in June of 2007 as all my attention was focused on the dissertation. I resolved to do more in 2008, and I also started fixating on markers, especially black markers.
2008
I have always been a fan of
sigune's beautiful inked fanart especially the way Snape's greasy hair and robes are such a pure deep black. This was something I just couldn't achieve with colored pencils, and so I started relying on black pens when depicting Snape and Harry's black hair or anyone's black robes. I'd also begun using the black, sepia and sanguine colored small nib Pitt pens to line my art and found that the brush sized sanguine pen was the perfect color for Lily's or any of the Weasley's red hair.The picture "Surrogate Kisses" I did for the first
less_for_you (Lily/Severus exchange) shows this merging of ink and pencil.More and more marker began creeping into my fanart - especially in hair and robes.
In the summer, after attending
ani_bester's workshop on watercolor, I tried my hand at incorporating water color as background for my fanart. This necessitated using a much rougher paper, which had an interesting effect on colored pencil and ink. I liked the effect seen here and most especially here, but the paper did seem to absorb a lot out of my pens.I was also particularly frustrated with the stripeyness of my black and thought a change of paper might help - something much, much smoother. And thus, I purchased my first pad of Strathmore Bristol smooth which really highlighted for me what a huge difference paper can make! Inspired by my lovely new paper, I thought I'd try something different and cheated on my colored pencils a bit.
2009
One of the things I'd observed when participating in big exchanges and challenges, especially those that incorporated both fic and art, was that multi-panel fanart that told a story was particularly well-received. Multi-panel art also seemed like an good way to effectively hit all the prompts in challenges like the
snarry_games where sometimes the genres may only be obvious from a sequence of pictures.Thus, I began experimenting with some multi-panel art, which resulted in this very silly and NSFW entry for Team AU in the
hd_worldcup done completely in ink and posted in May:Click the image above to go directly to the full fanart entry.
I did have fun with this multi-panel art, but I missed my colored pencils, and I also realized that it takes a certain skill to lay-out images, place speech bubbles, draw straight lines, and work within a certain number of frames to effectively tell a story this way, and that I wasn't sure I had it in me.
A few things happened in 2009 that had a major impact on my fanart since then. The first was that I ran out and bought a few giant copic markers to see if this might help alleviate my stripeyness problem. They're incredibly expensive, but they come in some luscious colors, so I bought more than just my usual black. In addition, while at Azkatraz,
tbranch loaned me a piece of art paper, which was half the size of the paper I normally use. Suddenly, it occurred to me that I could cut my 9x12 paper in half or in quarters and not have to spend so much time shading in huge swatches of empty background with my colored pencils. This would also mean I wouldn't go through my pencils and markers as fast and that I could produce more fanart quickly. And that's how I was able to do all this in such a short amount of time!2010
This brings us up to the present day, where my five year fanniversary and Draco's 30th birthday coincide, which has resulted in another fanart first. 31 long fics and 112 pieces of art were produced for the DracoBigBang to celebrate. I drew a total of six illustrations for three different fics, including
deathlydragon's The Consequences of Obsession, elle_blessing's Dark Heart Silhouette and lucianwolf's Burning Astoria. It is the final fic that led to this post regarding a fanart first. I've finally drawn full-frontal male nudity, and it seems rather fitting that it should be the object of my first piece of finished fanart (and his son) who should receive this honor.
Happy birthday, Draco Malfoy. I hope you enjoy your big bang!
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2010-06-05 08:18 pm (UTC)And the drawings are great.
This post was fun. :)
no subject
Date: 2010-06-05 08:20 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-06-06 06:15 pm (UTC)Oh, that fic was a seriously good read. I wasn't sure how I'd feel about it when I started, but then I couldn't stop until I made it to the end. And I love your portrayal of adult Draco and his son.
no subject
Date: 2010-06-07 12:29 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-06-05 08:43 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-06-05 10:42 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-06-05 11:15 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-06-06 01:58 am (UTC)*hugs*
The prompts I get for less have been really amazing and really push me to depict things I would never think of.
no subject
Date: 2010-06-06 02:15 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-06-06 03:15 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-06-06 04:36 am (UTC)Are we gonna have another drink-n-draw at Infinitus? I haven't done any fanart in a billion years!
no subject
Date: 2010-06-06 04:39 am (UTC)Thank you. It is nice to look back and actually see change and to recognize that while I still have a lot of trouble with things, I have gotten better at others. I really do like the skin tones I've managed for white characters, but I am completely lost when it comes to depicting characters of color. That's something I'd like to work on.
There absolutely MUST be a drink and draw. Maybe I'll poke
no subject
Date: 2010-06-06 05:31 am (UTC)It's wonderful to see the progression of your work, it is rich with love and color and fun. So brilliant to look at! Always makes me smile.
Blessings to you future creativity!
no subject
Date: 2010-06-06 01:44 pm (UTC)*hugs*
no subject
Date: 2010-06-06 01:31 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-06-06 01:44 pm (UTC)And yes, three cheers for a drink n draw!
no subject
Date: 2010-06-08 05:47 am (UTC)I shudder to think what would have happened to me if I had never met you online. *hugs*