quick little doodle from near the start of the bang. i really liked the shape and focus on daisuga in the gesture here, but it didn’t translate well to lineart.
between that sketch and the rest of these progress screenshots, i did the entirety of piece 2. i only came back to this one near the end!
same wyvern sketch, just colored. everything else here stayed into the final version, just getting painted over. more painting! me just pointedly avoiding the wyvern.aaaand finally looking up what the heck a wyvern is on the witcher wiki.
whew! i knew i’d be challenging myself by picking a fantasy summary which would involve both armor and (likely) either magic or fantasy creatures. the real struggle was the landscape, though! once i looked up how wyverns worked, and with a lot of ostrich references, the wyvern came together.
i did put it off til last, though, so you can tell i was apprehensive about it. i think it looks good!
the original shapes for the mountains in the background are from the pinnacles, a particular rock form at the summit of a hike in the coromandel, new zealand. it’s one of my favorite walks, and from the top you can see land and sea and sky. i pasted two pictures of the pinnacles onto my canvas, slapped some blocky grey shapes over top, and then deleted the picture layer, and went from there. that’s why they’ve got that distinctive shape!
thank you to my writer fruity for being such an inspiration, and our beta lina for wonderful cheerleading and attention to detail. please do check out the fic, guardians of a rare thing (named from a mountain goats song at my suggestion, much to my delight!) here.
it’s been a real adventure! i signed up to this bang because i knew the mods well, and because i’d had such a good time with the daisuga exchange previously.
i tend to sign up as an artist to things like bangs: there are plenty of writers about, and it gives me a chance to try out new things as a fledgling artist: scenes and ideas i would never have come up with on my own, without an amazing writer’s ideas and the constraints of a deadline.
this bang well overshot my expectations. my team, author piper and beta lin, have been incredible start to finish; it was really amazing coming in expecting to figure out one piece, possibly a comic, and being so taken by piper’s ideas that i ended up making five in a much looser style. i got to test my artistic ability in a few different ways!
oh, and i made an entire playlist that’s exclusively the mountain goats bc i’m like that. here it is:
finished pieces
“Daichi swore he felt something in his chest bloom.”” “I like him, Keishin,” Suga finally finished, and he looked up then, looking over to his friend, his coach.”“He sat down on the bench and peered closer at the photograph, trying to figure out why it had ended up in his locker.”“Tonight, there had been less talking and more shared silence.”
and finally, the one that was a specific technical challenge (and a spoiler!):
Where before the air around them had simply been still and quiet, it was now filled with what looked like stardust. It streamed out from behind Suga, filtering into the air and carried off by an invisible breeze.
reflections
there are so, so many talented artists in this big bang. there were definitely many times i looked at my art and thought oh, i don’t have the skill to do justice to this. in the end, i went for something quite unpolished; they have a certain consistency to them, but i kept changing the ways i was coloring and lining. if i could do it again, i’d write down what i did the first time, or take a timelapse so i could replicate it!
all that said, i’m far too old to beat myself up over what is after all about collaboration, and fun, and a learning experience. volleyball is a sport where you always look up, as ukai says!
here’s a couple of cool little bits.
i was not sober for the entirety of this piece, which i wasn’t actually intending to do.
this piece was… an accident. piper asked what way daisuga should be lying down, i found a reference image, and then was immediately obsessed with the specific body language of that image. here we are.
and here’s a timelapse for the fic graphic. the fence and buildings were me messing around really quickly with this amazing brushset – i use clip studio paint, but it’s available for other software too. 10/10 would rec; you can see how quickly i’m working, and yet it comes out pretty passable!
all in all, i’m super happy with my experience in this bang, and with what piper, lin and i were able to make together. i hope you like it!
and i hear that the mods are planning a 2022 bang, so… keep an eye out for that if you’d like to join us.
finally, a little fun thing i learned: GIFs are way larger for the same quality than videos are? encoding is cool and wild.
this GIF is half the resolution of the video, and it has to be to not be much too big for ao3!
tony's minisite <3 
