How did you first find Elithien or vice versa and how did you guys decide to do collabs together?
I’d been following @elithien for quite a while because she’s one of my favourite Reylo artists, and a long time ago she did a Dramione piece that I really loved.
So this is basically my oldest otp ever. I was around 13 years old when I first sank so bloody hard into this ship. Reading HPatCC has awake
Earlier this year, I’d been thinking about writing a piece in response to one of @nikitajobson’s works, sort of as a thank you, because she had been the first person to make a piece of fanart for me, and it basically had me in tears and semi-hysterical for several days. So I had started writing a ficlet, but it was a little bit angsty, and I’d never written in response to a piece of art before, and I was nervous about doing it because I thought it might come across like I was trying to use someone’s work to promote myself or something.
But then I thought about it more, I thought about how when an artist creates a piece inspired my writing it’s so meaningful to find out that I inspired someone else to create. I’m here writing fanfic because there were stories that captured my imagination, so the idea that anything I produce could inspire someone else in kind is sort of the dream. So I decided I was being silly and paranoid. I wrote a couple other little drabbles here and there in response to art, kind of testing the waters.
And then Elithien started posting some Dramione art, and the second one she posted, I saw it and I immediately had an idea, so I wrote it really fast and added it on under her post as a way of expressing my excitement at seeing one of my favourite artists in my fandom. And she liked it!
She messaged me, because I would never have had the nerve to approach my art idol and would have just pined indefinitely from a distance, and after I finished having a heart-attack, we started chatting and she told me about some of her other ideas, and sent me a sneak peek of a Beltane piece she was working on and the concepts and background details she had in mind for it, so when she posted that, I used all the background details and concepts she mentioned and used them to write a piece to go along with it.
And it just sort of evolved from there, we share a lot of headcanons and bounce ideas off each other, and then I’ll ping her while I’m writing and confirm details from the art that I want to lean into. She draws my kinks and I write hers. 😝 And we decided to post the collab on ao3 in order to make sure tumblr didn’t go and eat them at some point, as tumblr is wont to do.
