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Arts Notes:
For a long while I've wanted to try my hand at female Sam. So, I started this attempt last year in early November and worked on it till late December. Then I just couldn't work on it anymore. It wasn't until late June this year that I started feeling hopeful about this work again.
I'm a little worried I might have squashed instead of cultivated my art drive some more, because I struggled to finish this. But oh well. I'm done working on this. I did what I could muster and I accept the end results. I kind of want to make a Female Michael!Dean companion piece... but I don't know how likely that will be for me to do.
This is a non-challenge work, but I made it its own post because there was a lot of WIP screenshots. So, if you're interested in the process, see you in the next chapter♥
If not then see you if I make anything else in the future and,
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Nov 1:
I had actually made this inital sketch earlier than Nov 1, but I didn't make a screenshot of it till that day. So I don't know exactly when I started this project. But, I do remember I initially drew a lot of inspiration from the Bride Looking Over Her Shoulder picture from WeddingDay Magazine's that I found through Google images.
Later, I saw the AW Bridal A-Line Floor Length V-Neck Tulle Wedding dress and made some alternations to the sketch and made the artistic choice to add a flower crown and shorten the dress length.And for Sam's face, at first I mainly studied a lot of the face app and the like images of Female Jared/Sam on Tumblr from blogs like femjared, femsam, and others to figure out where to place lines.And I added the samulet to hang around Sam's neck. At this point I was still debating whether this was just going to be Sam or Lucifer!Sam. If it was just going to be just Sam then the samulet was the something borrowed. If Lucifer!Sam it would be added angst and desecration.
I don't remember being completely happy with the sketch. But I do remember being too impatient to wait on getting the lines where they needed to be. I can't remember why I felt rushed though?
Nov 11th:
So, around 10 days later, and I hadn't made much progress outside of the basic lineart, which I wasn't completely happy with. It didn't help that I kept not wanting to work on this piece at all.
Nov 13th:
It also didn't help that I'm not a fan of doing flower lineart. I love the way flowers look, but I hate the effort it takes to make their lineart look decent. Plus, in the initial sketch I had a bunch of flowers in the background. I told myself that I wouldn't do lineart for the background too, I'd just digitally paint it, but I wasn't really convincing myself that it'd be worth the effort regardless to make all the roses and whatever else I would have decided to put in. So, I was not motivated at all.I did decide I wanted the veil to be draped away from the body as if wind was gracefully blowing through it.
Nov 30th:
17 days later I decided to push to the base color stage, which was when I discovered the face I made was awful and didn't line up right.I also added moles to Sam's body rather than just the face like I usually do. I mainly looked at Jared's 2021 Men's Health interview and photo shoot for guidance.
Dec 1st:
One day later and I had the face in a better place, but I still had issues with it. And wasn't confident in the body's anatomy.
But instead of worrying about it more I just moved on to something else. I was tired of looking at Jared and his + her face. So, I moved on to the lace instead. Which was a nice distraction. I looked at rose lace patterns on google then made my version of one and then repeated and distorted it around the edge of the dress.
I cleaned it up, made it white, added a second row to allude to the lace that goes around the other side of the legs.
I moved the angle of the canvas around to show the lace on the veil. I repeated the same process, but it was more difficult because the folds. PaintTool Sai doesn't have the ability to make a flat patter round, so it was tricky to figure out how curve it. And I also had the inside facing lace on a lower opacity than the outside facing lace. I don't know if that's visible in the finished piece when I added the luminosity layer.
Dec 29th:
I took a break from working on this so I could hunker down on my WinterNatural piece that took up most of my focus during around Dec. 3rd-12th.After that project one of my friends, Amber, mentioned that the actress for Jessica Moore, Sam's Stanford girlfriend, Adrianne Palicki looked like a female Sam. And that's when I finally got a good reference for the body and face anatomy. Her pictures from GI Joe Retaliation, Red Carpet for the 63rd Emmy Awards, and some of the pictures from Agents Of Shield helped a lot.By the 29th I was confident in the face and neck lineart. Lucifer!Sam also won out and I gave Sam a red glow for her eyes.
I also decided on what kind of bouquet I wanted to make. I was inspired by a lot of fall bouquets with dark dried reds, peachy whites, rusty red oranges, and deep blues shown on google images, which I color picked from. And then I stopped working on this project for about 5-6 months give or take.Some of it was because I wanted to work on Ocean Fishing and Tangerine Dreams for WetSammy and that took up February-Early April. The rest was because my artistic wells were drying up. Summer Comfort, that I finished mid-April, was a small ditch effort of me trying to rekindle my art drive. I forced myself to get that small project out. And then I didn't want to art anymore after that. I was actually worried that I didn't want to draw fanart anymore. I was even questioning if I should still stay in the fandom or not off and on. I withdrew a lot. Spncarfuckersweek rekindled some of my fandom love back, but not enough to get me fully back to where I was a few years back. For better or worse maybe.It wasn't until the later half of June, that I started feeling like maybe I could art again. But when I started, I struggled to focus and wasn't having much joy in the process even if I thought I succeeded in getting it to look good. I kept escaping working on it.
June 19th:
I finished the lineart and filling in the base colors for the rose crown.
June 21st:
I filled in the base colors for the bouquet.
I started on the background. I color picked the cloud colors and the cliff edge colors from an image I found through google by search for hell terrains.
I cleaned up the clouds and started adding strokes to the cliff edge.
Then I slapped on dilapidated buildings and fire in the background. And I made Lucy!Sam visible to see how it all looked together.
June 23rd:
I cleaned up the cliff edge.
June 24:
I cleaned up the first line of fire.
Then I cleaned up the furthest back set of the buildings and added at red multiply layer for the atmosphere. June 26:
I cleaned up the rest of the buildings and then added a second line of fire. Which looks like a different style, but I didn't care. That's all I wanted to do for the background buildings and flames. July 1:
I finished shading the hair and started shading the skin.
July 6:
Then I started shading and lighting together. But I took a screenshot of what I finished the day before. I finished all the shading except for the rose crown. I also added a screen layer below the figure folder to add a yellow-orange haze to the atmosphere.
Here's the luminosity layer on.
Then I shade the crown, cleaned up the lighting, added a sun/halo behind Sam's head, and because the background sky looked empty I slapped on a boarder that's supposed to be a dilapidated building's arc and pillars in the foreground.After this, I cleaned up the boarder, blurred the boarder in photoshop elements 15, added a highlight to the boarder, added flocks of birds in the sky, played with atmosphere and haze opacities. And then I decided I was finished.Musical inspiration: Lana Del Rey- Cinnamon Girl Lana Del Rey- Burning Desire Lana Del Rey- Body Electric I Monster- Who is She? Egzod & Maestro Chives - Royalty ft. Neoni Chris Grey - Let The World Burn Indila - Derniere Danse Seven Nation Army (Glitch Mob Remix) // slowed + reverb by Psycor Legends Never Die (Against teh Current) // slowed/reverb by Chewy ft Pixsy Lacrimosa - Slowed and kinda terrifying by Mony PGRammstein - Sonne [SLOWED] best part by the_phonkface Farben - Orange Sector (slowed to perfection + reverb) by Suei After Dark X Sweater Weather (ultra slowed N reverbed) by OrdinaryVibesI think that's everything.As always,