The Snapedom Summer Fest is nearly over! I really enjoyed taking part in it; I thought it was a great idea and I hope there will be a repeat next summer :D. For those of you who weren’t in the loop (though at this point it is difficult to imagine anyone being less in the loop than myself): the Fest was an exchange between writers, artists and crafters. So I would draw an illustration for a writer’s existing story, and a writer would write a story to go with one of my existing pictures. I got matched with mary_j_59. And it’s really high time I pointed you at the story she wrote for me!

If you have ever read any of Mary’s stories, you will know that she is not really into spectacular action or incredible romance. Instead, she paints sensitive, psychologically true pictures of her characters, who are at their most interesting between grand events rather than in the middle of them. She likes them deeply human, with imperfections that touch her readers. Me, I lurve imperfections XD.

I was really excited when Mary said she wanted to tackle Ride of the Valkyrie, my slightly crazy picture featuring Snape, my OFC Brynhild Bromley, and a white horse. I had never expected anyone to be interested in writing my original character - I had never heard of a writer writing another person’s Snape/OFC ship! Naturally I was thrilled, and even more so because it was Mary who would be writing…

Brynhild in Mary’s story sounds so much like Brynhild that it makes me all giggly and a little spooked out *g*. And I just adore that my favourite hag, Severus’s mother-in-law, gets to put in an appearance too :D. My OFCs and I feel loved and honoured. Thank you very much for a great gift, Mary!

Go, pop over to Snapedom and have a look…

Ride of the Valkyrie!

Okay, I finally have an idea for my hp_art_project entry. I mean, I had one before (this one, actually), but I wasn't satisfied with it, and even though I tried to improve on it, it never seemed to go anywhere inspiring. And that's a problem because it has to be a GOOD picture - it's destined for Her Royal JKRness herself and it's supposed to move her to tears of compassion for Snape, which I'm sure you'll all agree is one tough job. I doubt I'm up to it, but hey, I'm determined to give it my best shot :-).

Anyway, today during my lunchbreak I did a ten-minute sketch that I think might turn into something. It will take a lot of time and effort, though, because the design is a very elaborate affair involving a stained-glass window. Heh. Here's hoping I pull it off. (protowilson, are you around? :P - Hey, I got an idea for your picture too! It's because I'm busy! *g*)

I don't get round to posting my Gaulish adventures at LJ anymore :/. Maybe I can squeeze them in later this week...? I scarcely have the time to update one journal, and Semagic doesn't work with Blogspot :(. So for the time being, the two people who are curious about my Gauls are invited to snoop around in the other Sleeper's Den for portraits of Veridicus and Volca and doodles from work, including sketches of a new character.

It was not a good idea of me to get a Feedburner account for my Blogspot. Even when someone leaves a rare comment, Feedburner says that I didn't get a single visit, and it appears only one person in the universe has subscribed to the blog's feed XD. That will teach me to stray from fanart ;P. But I will keep sinning!

Whew! I had to start this picture all over - I inked it with my brush pen and then saw that all sorts of things were wrong with it :P. I redrew it with my Staedtler pens and got a much more pleasing result, also in terms of details.

I know that people like my black-and-white pictures better than the colour ones, but the scene I drew here is a nocturnal one and I thought it would look like a large ink blot if I tried to keep it in b/w. This turned into another experiment, and I'm not displeased with the final result. More important, though, is the question whether mary_j_59 is happy with it, because this was done for her, for snapedom's Summer Fest. It's an illustration of her story All Hallow's Eve.

Title: Lullaby
Artist: sigune
Rating: G
Media: Staedtler pens, Chinese ink and watercolours on cold-pressed watercolour paper.



(Lullaby)

I was about to give up on this one, really. I worked on it till two in the morning, and the result wasn't at all what I had wished it to be. Urgh. Sleep has become very precious to me, and I wasted it for a lousy picture! The problem was the blacks, which is a bit ... painful ... in a Snape picture. I really don't manage to mix a good black, and I didn't want to use an unmixed one because those always look a bit dull - and a dull black wouldn't have looked good next to Severus's luminous skin. When I finally went to sleep, Snape had blue-purple hair and blue-purple robes. It was a real pity, I thought, because my inks were good - I'd done them with a Faber-Castell brush pen, which I find more manageable than a real brush.

This morning I decided to pull a Marini. Okay, that sounds better than it looks - I'm *far from* a Marini :/. I only mean that I opted for suggesting black in a way that I have picked up from Marini's art for Le Scorpion. I probably did it backwards, though. It's probable that Marini inks first and then adds watercolour; in this case I painted first and added ink afterwards :-).

The result is okay, but I'm not sure it's entirely what it could have been. Maybe I'll end up doing another version...?




( Oh, aching heart! )

I have been thinking for a while that one way to make my drawings look less static might be to ink them with brushes instead of with my Staedtler pens. With the pens I can vary the lines by adding pressure, but only a bit; if a line is thin in one place and thick in another, it's usually because I have gone over the line several times until I think it is thick enough in the place where I want it to be so. Of course such a process hardly ever produces swishy lines. I don't swish: I sculpt! On the other hand, I have a very good reason for having started to work with Staedtler pens: they just give me a lot of control. And when it comes to pictures, I am a total control freak.

Brushes = scary. I have an intense admiration for people who manage to get brushes to behave. pojypojy is one of those miracle-workers, and Cabepfir is another. I would be inclined to think it's a particularly Italian skill :P, but Béatrice Tillier, who created the wonderful watercolours of Le bois des vierges, is clearly adept at it too.

I wanted to have a try myself (without the hope of ever reaching the high standards mentioned above, *sigh*), with the colour version of my Aching Heart Snape picture. But before I started to ink that, I thought it prudent to do a try-out. The try-out is what you find below.

( Brushed inks )

Look!! It's PG art!! Whatever happened to Sigune's good old G??!!

Argh! Snape's in a state of partial undress!!

(Don't get your hopes up too high though...)

This is a study for a watercolour painting I hope to do tomorrow. I think it's quite canon-like, but quite un-Sigune-like. Still, I had the idea, and the only way to get rid of it was to carry it out. Hopefully in the finished picture it will be clear that the heart is a tattoo, not a Mysterious Floating Object :-).



( Oh aching heart )

sylvanawood tagged me…

1. Select Random on your MP3 player/Windows Media.
2. List the first five songs and what they mean to you.
3. Tag five people!

I don’t have an MP3 player, and there is nothing uploaded to my Windows Media - for some reason, I always listen to entire albums, so I have never looked for a means to play songs randomly… But for the meme’s sake I picked up the top five CDs from the pile on my desk and picked one song from each. The result is a bit … eclectic :-).

( Music Meme )

I've made a new tag for "train art" :-). I only ever seem to get pictures done on the train these days... It's very quiet on the art front. The problem is that I have a few ideas for more complicated pictures, but I don't seem to get them right when I sit down and try to sketch. So here is a very simple Snape portrait that I made in the meantime.



My train pictures are always in pencils. The train really shakes too much for me to be able to ink, and though I have entertained the idea of taking my watercolours with me (I have one of these tiny travelling kits), I dismissed the idea because it still takes a whole set-up with water bowls and tissues and something to protect the surface on which I am working. That, and there is the same shaking problem, of course. So, pencils.

Pencils can really get you lovely results on their own, so there is no reason to think that they should only be used for sketching the basis of pictures that will get another finishing. But personally I am not quite happy with the results I tend to get. With pencils, as with most other media, I just lack technique. I need to exercise and learn. One thing I have had to admit to myself while doing the Snape picture below is that for pencils, I am really better off with paper that is a bit grainier than the very smooth stuff I usually prefer. Smoothness is great for my inks, but for pencils? Naw.

Anyway: here is what I drew last Friday: ( Severus )

The reveals for hp_beholder are posted!

My gift story, Driving Mrs Weasley, was written by miramiraficfic. It's a tender, astutely observant story about my favourite canon couple, Mr and Mrs Weasley :).

My own gift was for tripperfunster. As soon as I saw the names of Dumbledore and McGonagall on her wish list, I was struck with this one idea that I could not get out of my head. It's ... silly. And het. But I hope she enjoyed it nevertheless :P.

Title: A Patented Daydream

Rating: G
Pairings: MM/AD
Media: inks, watercolour, gold Hybrid roller
Warnings: Crack. Oh, and bondage, but I'm just saying that to attract viewers. See rating.
Summary: Some loves are impossible, but dreaming about them is not. Minerva McGonagall tests a Weasley product.
Artist's Notes:This picture was betaed by protowilson, sydpad, and Cabepfir. *BIG HUGS* to them for helping me out - those comments were immensely useful. Anything that still looks odd is entirely due to my ineptitudes. No one but myself is responsible for the colours - or for the idea :P.




( A Patented Daydream )

I don't seem to do anything else than to keep repeating that I'm not dead and haven't abandoned LJ or fandom... It's just that work is killing me, so to speak. The company hired me because they really, really, really needed someone to help them out, so I find myself doing hours and hours of (utterly uncompensated, haha) overtime. And if perchance I manage to get to the station in time for a comparatively early train, you can bet the stupid thing is delayed by at least a quarter of an hour! ( Read more... )

Anyway - during weekends I try to make the most of the time I have left after doing all the necessary things (like shopping for supplies and necessities) that I don't get the occasion to do on weekdays. Mostly I end up painting and drawing. I have done some War in Gaul. There are also two new Snape pictures in the works, and I am still attempting to adapt (and post in a few archives) my now-AU Snape-and-family-in-Germany epic. The beginning of the story takes some effort to put right; the middle is mostly fine; and the end requires some juggling too. But I am determined to get it done :). I have got to chapter two so far *g*. When I have a few more chapters and can promise a more or less steady posting rhythm, I will bringing them out.

Last weekend I had great fun messing around with my watercolours. I have rather come to adore them, even if the results don't always live up to my enthusiasm :P. It suddenly occurred to me that I have bought two Moleskine watercolour notebooks, but that I have been nervous about using them. It's always like that with me: I am addicted to notebooks, but somehow I have the idiotic notion that I shouldn't use them unless I am going to produce a masterpiece. But why on earth shouldn't I use them to doodle and experiment? *shakes head at self* At least it would mean I have my pictures (good and bad ones alike) together in bundles instead of on loose bits of paper that lie around or get lost and/or damaged. So I gathered my courage and started painting furiously. The six little pictures/portraits that resulted are of various quality and can be found below.

( Ambiorix's four sisters and best friend )

Happy Birthday, Noutie!

Here is a Sandman picture for you :-). In case you don't like how Morpheus came out, you will have to agree with me that at least Matthew doesn't look bad, even though when I started I was worried he might end up looking like a chicken. He doesn't!



( Morpheus and Matthew )

Sometimes the office printer spits out blank pages instead of the text it is supposed to print for me. Whenever that happens, I get a smile on my face, because I already know what purpose that paper is going to serve :).

I drew this picture of Morpheus from Neil Gaiman's Sandman on the train (- you can tell by the extremely wonky calligraphy on the right :P), on extra smooth printer paper.

( Morpheus )

SQUEEEEEE!!!!!

I signed up for hp_beholder, a fic and art exchange moderated by bethbethbeth at IJ. It is all about those canon characters who don't get enough love in fanfic. The idea appealed to me, so I offered to do some gift art. But the best thing is of course that I got a gift fic in return :D! It has posted last Friday, so now I must urge you all to go and read it, especially lewlinx :).

Title: Driving Mrs. Weasley
Rating: G
Pairings: Arthur/Molly
Word Count: 1403
Warnings: None
Summary:Title: In a missing moment from Chamber of Secrets, Arthur and Molly make up after the Ford Anglia fight.

It's a lovely story featuring Arthur Weasley, who is one of my favourite characters in canon, and his Mollywobbles. Read it to find out why the Ford Anglia can fly, and just enjoy a great IC missing moment.

*huggles Anonymous*

...Yes, it's an anonymous exchange. I fear that as soon as my contribution gets posted, it will be immediately obvious to anyone who knows my art that it is mine XD. If I was supposed to masquerade behind an unusual style, it should have been in the briefing :P.

But what are you still doing here? Go read my delicious Weasley gift!