mortmere

FFF (=Finnish fanartist in their forties, haha) | Currently posting mostly due South/C6D stuff | Rarely reblogging anything here | But reblogging ALL the dS fanart on my sideblog: ds-fanart-appreciation.tumblr.com | Other/past fandoms: Starsky & Hutch (see shinventory.wordpress.com), Star Trek TOS, Inspector Lewis, BBC Sherlock | I'm mortmere on AO3, YouTube and DW, Reetta Karoliina on FB.

[mortmere]

Happy Eleventh of March!

Watching the Very Important Speech just now, I suddenly remembered I made this panoramic view too late last year - on the Sixteenth of March, so I didn't post it then. Now I'm on time! Sometimes happiness is the cyclical nature of old fandom events. \o/

This is simply two frames from the speech scene merged together - it's interesting how it's not very obvious in the scene that Thatcher and Fraser are standing side by side like this: the camera strictly pairs Thatcher with Turnbull and Fraser with Ray K. I had to take a close look at the scene to make sure this is indeed the way these four stand together.

[mortmere]

Happy Halloween! Here's Diefenbaker carving a pumpkin the only way that he thinks matters - and it's not even filled with donuts: many wolves do love pumpkins. I have been lackadaisical in marking my files, but I think the reference photo I used here was snatched from Wolf Hollow, one of the many wolf sanctuaries where pumpkins are a favorite fall enrichment.

^That's a ~20-minute doodle with my brand new alcohol markers - a new-to-me medium which I hope might kickstart my interest in making art after a few very tiring RL months. I really like the markers, but so far I've spent more time just organizing and sampling them than actually drawing something - so many lovely colors! The other few things I've drawn are also somewhat due South related - maybe I'll just make this post a sketch dump. I think these are in the order I made them; for the CKR sketch I used a cheapy cheap no-brand marker set I found at Clas Ohlson, the rest are made with Ohuhu markers I bought after realizing I really enjoy markers but would prefer brush tips (the CO set is chisel/fine).

[mortmere]

Lupine Bond (oil pastel painting)

Wolf pack behaviour among Arctic lupines. Ray is very soon going to be licked directly on the mouth. Who gets there first, Dief or Fraser?

Notes under the cut (they're long; I can't write anything short!)

Another day, another finished WIP - or rather, a new piece reworked from a nearly abandoned digital WIP. This idea had sat in the "rough photomanip" phase of my digital painting process for two or three years and was going to stay there because I was unable to find a usable reference photo for Ray (the one I had was blurry and entirely differently lit than everything else in the picture). There wasn't much else in the manip than the character references plopped on a stock photo of two guys sitting in a random field, and then I had a bunch of separate photos of Arctic lupines.

After drawing Dief admiring cherry blossoms with oil pastels earlier this year, I knew I wanted to paint the field of Arctic lupines with oil pastels, too, and of course I also wanted to see how these rough manips would work as references for oil pastel paitings, and how easily I could combine stuff from other reference pics on the spot. I'm happy to say it worked pretty well - this only took me three hours and didn't feel very hard - not that I was being very careful with their arms etc. I did suspect working like this was going to mean compromises in character likeness, and I wasn't wrong. :D Their faces are an inch and a half high on the A4 page, so not much room to fiddle with the blunt pastel sticks there ("CKR without a map" was a phrase that I repeated in my mind while I was working on Ray's face, wiping everything away and trying again - then I decided to keep everything really vague). But the lupines were just as pleasant to draw as I thought they would be! And the lupine creature in the middle, of course. 

You won't get through these notes without some speculation why lupines are called lupines. What do they have to do with wolves? There seems to be two theories. Some sources say Romans thought the plant was toxic to wolves, and that's it. The other theory is that lupines were considered predator-like because they can grow in very poor soil where other plants can't: people assumed they had robbed the soil of whatever other plants would need for growing. Sadly, where I live (Finland) lupines are just like that: they spread from gardens into wild nature decades ago and have now invaded huge areas, replacing many native plants. I think lupines are really beautiful in bloom - they are an essential part of early summer landscapes for me; the best time is right now! - but hardly anything else grows where they have taken root, and they're also very harmful to bumblebees. I was relieved that I could put my aesthetic love of lupines into this picture with a good conscience, because Arctic lupine is native to Canada - it is actually considered to enrich the soil and recommended as a garden plant, too. 

[mortmere]

"A smart animal trying to make a living in tough conditions”

They also say wolves are "intelligent, opportunist, secretive"... Some of these adjectives might apply to a certain half-wolf, too. But which ones?

NOTES: I was getting antsy after finishing my stacked rewatch art project. After going through my WIPs and potential reference pics over and over again, I finally picked up pencil and paper this afternoon, and only a few hours later, here I am, posting a thing! In theory, this was one of my WIPs, but I never got anywhere with it my old digital way (collecting a ton of reference pics first and creating a rough manip with them to paint over). Now I just ignored those plans and drew the lineart from a scratch in about half an hour (most of that time went to checking the details of Ray's apartment, otherwise I didn't use any reference pics at all). Then I took a photo of the sketch and continued on Photoshop. This was fun and quite rewarding, and while I could've gone on and turned this into something more realistic, I just couldn't see the point in that. 

The inspiration for this piece originally came from a YouTube video about wolves as pets (not a good idea!): no spot, however high, is safe from them. The video showe a wolf sleeping on top of a full-sized refrigerator, but Ray's refrigerator is small and has too much stuff on top of it, so I went for a mix of that wolf video and another YT vid of a surprise deer eating Doritos in someone's kitchen. 

The descriptions of wolves come from the still excellent 1993 wolf documentary, "In the Company of Wolves" (I put the YouTube link in the replies). One of its highlights is the narrator Timothy Dalton's trip to Ellesmere Island to see the Arctic wolves (you want to see the midnight sun? you get that, too! it's insane how high the sun is there in summer even at 2 am; mind you, this is several hundred kilometres further north than Tuktoyaktuk).

It makes me laugh that I have nothing to say about the bottom part of the picture.  I just want to draw Dief, but I want it to be F/K, too. (Okay, one thing about the boys: the best way to get me distracted from a sex scene in a Fraser/Kowalski fic is not mentioning where Dief is at that time: I always start checking back if I missed something. If I'm not told where he is, I start imagining stuff like this pic.)

[mortmere]

Final Thoughts: Due South Stacked Rewatch/Timestamp Roulette Art Challenge

Personal favorites (in no particular order):

Well this was fun. And it wasn't. Like most things, it was a very mixed bag. 

I started out in September wanting to see if I could develop a personal, recognizable lineart style, something easy-looking and confident. Turns out I wasn't very motivated to do that after all. Or maybe I'm so stuck in my ways that I don't want to put myself through the process of de-learning some things and learning new ways of working. I've always been self-taught in almost everything (just doing stuff intuitively my way) and get easily irritated if I'm pushed out of my comfort and skill zones. Not a great learner!

The one thing where I definitely did step out of my comfort zone and gained confidence in was posting stuff that's less than perfect to my own eye. Ha, got quite good at that, actually! I think I got over the fear that someone tells me "this is not up to your usual standards". I'm hoping - while definitely aiming to create stuff that gives people feels - that this will make me work quicker and post more happy-making art instead of sweating over whether a piece is good enough to be posted. And I truly hope that my shit-posting (as I've called my super quick doodle weeks) has given someone else out there a feeling that they, too, can post stuff that might not be perfect by some artificial standard. I keep saying that great fanart can be drawn with stick figures, too. 

One of the biggest joys in this project has been discovering oil pastels. They simply suit my way of working, the colors are easy to mix and I can work pretty fast (I'm impatient). One thing I've gotten a lot of feedback on is how much people love seeing traditional media used for fanart. I still don't know what to think of the difference between digital and traditional. Is there any? Don't I use my human hands to create digital art, too? What difference does it make if a piece of art exists in pixels instead of pigment (except that photographing the latter for online viewing is a pain in the ass)? I kept going back to digital art from time to time in this project, and certainly can't choose which I enjoy more, oil pastels or Photoshop. Probably will continue more with digital art for the simple reasons of less mess, no storage problems, available shortcuts to reach a better likeness, and endless editing options. The best medium for me is the one I actually bother to pick up to make art. 

This 38-week project was probably the largest-scale art experiment I've ever done - or will ever do, at least on a strict weekly schedule. I kept expecting RL stuff to throw me off schedule, but it didn't. I kept expecting I'd just give up at some point, but I didn't. I guess the joy of having even a small purpose in life (even if it was self-inflicted pain in the ass sometimes) was worth it.

Thank you for following this project - and super thanks to those who tried the actual timestamp art roulette challenge even once! It's still open - the instructions are in the first post here: https://mortmere.tumblr.com/tagged/*/chrono

(The link goes to a chronological view of all my art/crafts post from these past 9 months - it's been my "progress evaluation link" to see what I've managed to create so far.)

[mortmere]

Flashback + Letting Go

(Stacked Rewatch/Timestamp Roulette Art Challenge)

Ha, I'm so tired of this art project that the only way I could drag myself through this last week was challenging myself to use a medium I hadn't used before in this project (and be quick about it). So the first doodle is charcoal, the good old wonky stick type. The second - I don't even know what the hell it was, the reddish-brown stick was included in my cheapy cheap charcoal set, but I suspect it's simply a soft pastel (thankfully not a very dusty one). So maybe a bit of going back to the beginning there, as I briefly toyed with soft pastels early in this project.

I want to do some kind of end of project post with my personal favorites and "did I learn anything?" type of notes, but I'll just throw these out there right now and go do a little happy dance just because next week, and the next one, and the next one, I don't have to make any art unless I really want to. Not like anyone forced me the last 38 weeks, but, you know. I did it! :D

[allofthebeanz]

This week on noticing a bunch of stuff on the Due South sets...

@dirtyzucchini shared this pic for reasons that don't need explaining at this juncture, and because I wanted to see the mug, I zoomed in and...

Ray has a little alligator on his lamp <3

[mortmere]

The last we see of the alligator: it has swallowed the US flag on the desk.

(I agree it's an alligator - possibly a rubber one, definitely hollow and very, very cute. I've searched for this type of toy alligators, hoping to find the exact one (no luck), and Ray's alligator is by far the cutest specimen I've seen. Perfect happy little thing!)

[mortmere]

Red, White or Blue

(Stacked Rewatch/Timestamp Roulette Art Challenge)

Thatcher: Ah! Fraser: Ah!

A few weeks ago, I had a cunning plan: make a bunch of art for the last weeks of the stacked rewatch in advance and then post them according to the rewatch schedule and enjoy the last spring weeks free of art-making pressure. LOL that was the plan, but here I am, presenting another 10-minute pencil/fineliner doodle on Sunday evening because I have time for nothing else. Ah indeed!

But: next week is the last week of this project!

[mortmere]

Break Week Benton and Dief

(Stacked Rewatch/Timestamp Roulette Art Challenge)

For this last break week in the stacked rewatch, I had plans to make also an oil pastel sketch AND a digital sketch of this lovely promo pic, but real life (=a stomach bug) decided otherwise. So, I'm posting this 15-minute warm-up sketch I drew earlier in the week and call this week D-U-N done (while hoping to keep down my first real meal of the day - it's 7:30 pm). Also, because the original photo is so sweet and I don't think my 15-minute sketch does it enough justice, I'll include the photo here as well. Love the whole concept, but Dief's fuzzy pants and beaver tail are the highlights here.

[mortmere]

Victoria's Secret, Parts 1 & 2

(Stacked Rewatch/Timestamp Roulette Art Challenge)

The two faces of Victoria (oil pastels + some digital glow effect).

(I don't know if this ever happens to you, but sometimes I see someone use a random silly nickname (that I don't even find particularly funny or original) about a character, and then for some reason it gets glued to my brain. So, thanks to some random fan, Victoria has been "Icky Vicky" to me for years now. Not sure if that nickname was a fandom thing at some point, but I can't get rid of it anymore. I'd like to, but nope. It stays.)

[mortmere]

The Duel

(Stacked Rewatch/Timestamp Roulette Art Challenge)

Remembered just in time that this paper and ink were the disaster combo where erasing the pencil sketch smudged the ink - so instead of erasing, I added some pencil shading. This might be the second time the Riv makes an appearance in this project - and it's definitely the last lol. 4 more weeks to go!

[mortmere]

Heaven And Earth + Body Language

(Stacked Rewatch/Timestamp Roulette Art Challenge)

Sunday evening, doodling through the rest of this week's episodes. The good old timestamp roulette randomness worked again to take the pressure off the weekly art duty (I haven't used this format in a while; smelling the rat was a scene of my choice, though - it would've been unthinkable to not draw the rat!).

[mortmere]

Coming & Going - Pilot & CotW

(Stacked Rewatch/Timestamp Roulette Art Challenge)

It's a break week in the dS stacked rewatch, but since next week's schedule has three episodes including the pilot episode (and I'll be a bit busy), I decided to handle the pilot in advance. So, a pair of bookend landscapes: the very beginning of Fraser's Chicago journey and the very end where, led by Diefenbaker, he and Ray Kowalski have already dog-sledded into their happily-ever-after Arctic sunrise. These pictures are small, about 12x16 cm.

I finally tested my second set of oil pastels (Mungyo Gallery) that I bought around New Year. They're much softer than the other set I've used so far (Van Gogh), and to my surprise they work well on a type of mix media paper where the VGs were disastrous. Also, my first impression is that they photograph better than the VGs. I'm pretty fond of the drier feel of the VGs, though.

[mortmere]

All The Queen's Horses

(Stacked Rewatch/Timestamp Roulette Art Challenge)

The return of the oil pastels! I hadn't touched them in a couple of months because I got so tired of first setting everything up and then tidying after and THEN trying to get the picture photographed in a way that it looks the same on screen as it looks in reality (=nearly impossible) - but actually working with oil pastels there in between is still fun and rewarding.

[mortmere]

White Men Can't Jump to Conclusions + An Invitation to Romance

(Stacked Rewatch/Timestamp Roulette Art Challenge)

Just messing around today. I wanted a quick way out of this week's art duty so I decided to do pencil/fineliner doodles. Somehow the fineliner would not dry on the paper I used and the ink smudged when I erased the undersketch. I tried rescuing what little there was to rescue by coloring the pics with colored pencils. Then I destroyed them with a random "rubber stamp" effect on photoshop to get rid of that half-assed coloring. I'm happy with my sketch of Fraser's sneaker shame though. :D And now I can enjoy the rest of my Sunday free of art worries - mission accomplished!

[mortmere]

The Deal

(Stacked Rewatch/Timestamp Roulette Art Challenge)

:D Guess who's tireeeeeddd...? I ended up tracing this scene that I at first intended to paint free-hand in my usual style - and then just added a few blobs of color and am. calling. it. done.

(I spent some time this weekend organizing my old Starsky/Hutch art into the dedicated S&H archive and was reminded of my most ambitious art series - the Rainbow Series - that was on hiatus for two years because one part just wouldn't co-operate. It took major effort to push myself to finish the series in the best quality I could produce. I promised myself I would never hang myself on such Big Projects again. And, in spite of its scope, this dS Stacked Rewatch project is not like that AT ALL: any silly doodle will do as long as I keep moving forward and stay on schedule. But I still need to remind myself of that sometimes when I feel I have two non-dominant hands and want to throw my art equipment into the wall. So, on we go, doodling all the way!)

[mortmere]

Some Like It Red

(Stacked Rewatch/Timestamp Roulette Art Challenge)

Damn, as excited as I was about the Some Like It Red week, here I am, producing a quick sketch on Sunday and nothing more. I could've picked any number of lovely close-ups of Ms. Fraser, but I have a soft spot for how she looks in this street scene, her hair open and her jacket properly cinched at the waist. Also, always fun to do a crowd scene and trying to keep a balance between the people that are your focus and the rest of the crowd. I moved things around a bit to make Fraser and Ray stand out a bit more, not having random people cover them so much.