#dcbb2019

[sketching-fox]

My three artworks done for @ahaviel-selah fanfic: “Every Breath a Prayer” in  Dean And Castiel Big Bang.

Scenes from chapters 03, 10 and 17!

[purgatory-jar]

Here are the illustrations I did for this year’s DCBB! 

The fic is A Crash Course in Computer Safety, fic by @debatchery (followthattardis on ao3). 

You can find the link here: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21320872/chapters/50775124

I absolutely adored both reading this fic and working on the art for it, since it gave me a chance to work on action scenes! Go read it, it’s great, Cas is a major bamf and Dean’s thirst is hilarious. 

Thank you so much to the mods over on @deancasbigbang for being as awesome as always! 

[spnsmile]

@castielslittlestbee you are perfection ❤ thank you for this! 2019 back it was glorious...

Ancient Rome ☕ i hope you are in good health #dcbb2019 #Saturnalia Miracle

[rauko-is-a-free-elf]

DCBB 2019 - Rapunzel, Rapunzel

You guys...I’m so excited to finally be able to share this with you. This story by @diminuel​ is fantastic. I hope the art isn’t too bad either. 

Fic: Rapunzel, Rapunzel (AO3 link)

Author: @diminuel​

Artist: @rauko-is-a-free-elf​ (me, lol)

Summary: Once upon a time a scribe stole magical salad out of a witch's garden, setting Cas on a rather unfortunate journey. Having spent years doing the bloody work for a witch, he vowed to never do another act of black magic. After consequently failing to follow an order issued by Queen Mary, Castiel is banished to a lonely tower. But Mary has her own secrets and as retribution for a deal she made, her younger son is cursed. Seeing no other choice, she takes him to Castiel to be locked away, an order he doesn't plan on following. 18 years later Prince Dean shows up at the tower expecting to save his brother from an evil witch. Sam however snuck out on an adventure, leaving Dean to team up with Cas to find Sam before dark forces manage to use him for evil. A spin on the fairy tale of Rapunzel.

Tags: 

Alternate Universe - Fairy Tale, Rapunzel Elements, Witch Castiel, Prince Dean Winchester, Cursed Sam Winchester, Parent Castiel, Banishment, Deals With Witches, Difficult Decisions, Light Angst, Implied Sexual Content, Rowena wants to sell Sam on the Goblin Market, Cas just wants to be a good parent, Lonely Castiel, Unhelpful Gabriel, sharing a horse, Flirty Dean, Happy Ending, Very very temporary major character death

[whichstiel]

I was lying in a tent in the middle of a forest and sunlight was just beginning to filter through the trees. It was five minutes past the start of the second round of claims. I had just enough of a cell phone signal to slowly pull up the list of stories. And...there it was. One of my top five stories remained! There’s nothing like a successful claim to start the morning off right!

@scones-and-texting-and-murder​‘s story, Remember When, is a beautiful story about growing up and finding each other again. Here’s the summary:

Castiel Novak meets Dean Winchester in the summer of 1989 when they’re both ten years old.  Growing up in small town Kansas is as all-American as climbing trees and little league baseball, but the carefree days of childhood can’t last forever. With adolescence comes new challenges, and Cas finds himself frustrated by decisions Dean makes that he can’t understand. After a big fight junior year, they stop speaking for months, and when tragedy strikes Cas’s family, there’s only time for a quick, heartfelt goodbye before the Novaks move away.

Six years later, after the death of his father, Cas takes a semester off from grad school and returns to Kansas. There he finds the woods where they used to play bulldozed into a housing development, and the Winchester family similarly fractured and gone. In relaying this news to his mother, he learns Dean was keeping secrets of his own as they grew up, forced by circumstances to take on too much too young. Armed with this new information, Cas impulsively decides to drive west to find him and try to make things right.

You can read the teen rated version or the explicit version on AO3. See below for a little bit about the process!

When I originally read the summary, I was captivated by the description of the boys growing up with a tree in the background, as a touchpoint. I’d planned to do simple illustrations (The Giving Tree came to mind). And then I remembered that drawing is hard!

The story made me think a lot about memory and how, in films, flashbacks to the past are often faded or misty. I decided on a hybrid solution: I would do all white paper art for the background (evoking misty memory), but have bright, digital illustrations for key focal points of each image (i.e. the tree, the boys, etc.)

I like to let the cover set the tone for the rest of the pieces, so I started on that first. Friends, it did not go well. (Drawing is hard!) I scrapped my first idea and quietly panicked.

Failed Cover Drafts

I still liked the idea of all white art, or neutral toned art, but I wasn’t sure how to make it work. (If you’re familiar with what I do, you’ll know that I feel most comfortable swimming in color.) I found inspiration in a beautiful book cover (A song of three spirits, by J. Zachary Pike) and riffed off of it, drawing a stylized tree, and adding Dean, Cas, and Cas’s house to it. I wanted it to be mostly symmetrical, so I drew half of the tree, then scanned the design, put it in a photo editor, duplicated and flipped it. BOOM. One whole image achieved. I printed out template sheets, taped one to the top of the cardstock, and started cutting out all the shapes. The main circle was done by upending a bowl and tracing around it. (I really do not trust my eye or hand when it comes to making something symmetrical!)

I photographed it outdoors in full sun, spinning it around until I got the shadows to fall the way I wanted them to. The top cardstock design is balanced on a shadowbox picture frame, and set on top of some cheap green poster board.

Final Cover Drafts

Okay. So, one down. Now, how was I going to pull off the rest? And still have it fit with the cover? And be interesting? ARGH!

My original sketch for the first scene (marbles scene) was more of a 2D look. But once I had the cover worked out, I started thinking about circles as being one of the visual themes of the art series. The marbles scene changed from a 2D look to a minimalist set of circles. And then, since it seemed a little too minimalist, I added a carved mat and backdrop as well. Set against the same green posterboard as the cover, the two felt more unified to me.

Marbles Scene Drafts

Once I finished that, I decided any pretense of realism was pretty much out the window. For my third piece, I opted to make the prettiest dugout you ever did see, laced with an oak tree motif like the cover. I’d found an artist (Malin Koort) who made these really cool sort of 3D people. (They’re adorable - go check them out.) I decided to adapt that look for my own people (but with less stylistic flair).

Dugout Scene Drafts

Now I was feeling like I was in good shape, I finished up the divider (again with the same oak / swoop motif of the cover).

With a week to go, I thought about the joke I’d made at the start of our collaboration: that I’d make some NSFW art for the first time. Why not, I decided. I had time to give it a whirl. If it didn’t work out, my author still had plenty of pieces to fulfill the DCBB minimum. I again went with white on white, relying on shadow to pull out the edges in the image. There’s a little tiny dick about the size of a sliver of fingernail in the final picture, but the angle isn’t right to show it. It’s enough just to know it’s there, right?

Topographical Map of Sex

Pulling these pieces together, I definitely had Project Runway on my mind. To me, building these pieces was like building a fashion collection. Each piece had to be different and stand on its own, but still be visually and functionally tied together. So, using the same paper, similar techniques, and a repeating pattern really “made it work” for me!

Thanks for reading! If you liked this, please let me know! Drop a line on Tumblr or at my art masterpost on AO3.

Messy Workspace is My Brand

[kayrosebee]

Here are my art pieces for Magic in the Moonlight!

This was my first time participating in the @deancasbigbang and I decided to go big, and did art for two fics! This here was the first one I nabbed, but my second to post. As soon as I saw "birds" I knew I wanted it- and I was lucky enough to get it. Working with @ialwayscomewhenyoucall on her first dcbb has been so fun. She was excellent to work with; it's an adorable story, and I'm so happy to be a part of this!

Do yourself a favor, and read it on Ao3 here!

[dreymart]

Happy Supernatural Thursday!

For the Dean/Castiel Big Bang 2019, I collaborated with Diamond. When I saw the summary and that it was a Parent’s Trap retelling, I just HAD to claim it. I wasn’t even planning on participating this year, but I read the summary and yep. I had to get my hands on it before everyone else.

And... spoilers : it’s better than the Lindsay Lohan version.

The Step Brother’s Trap by Diamond

Cas is excited to finally go to camp with his best friend the summer before their senior year, but the activities Balthazar’s been talking up—most of which aren’t necessarily camp sanctioned—are forgotten when they meet a boy who looks exactly like Cas. Twins separated at birth when their parents split up, Cas and Jimmy decide to trade places after camp.

They’re hoping to pull it off long enough that each of them can get to know their second parent a little; and once they’re discovered, they’ll make it clear they won’t be kept out of each other’s lives again. For Jimmy, there’s the added bonus of getting to meet his favorite author. For Cas, growing up with only a father who did his best but until recently could charitably be described as a mostly functional alcoholic, going to live with not only his mother but also her wife and stepsons might finally show him what it feels like to be part of a family.

An already complicated scenario worsens when Cas develops a crush on Jimmy’s older stepbrother Dean—who seems confused by the small ways ‘Jimmy’ changed at camp, and unsettled when he starts to feel things he never has before.

[holydean]

finally can post my pieces for this year’s DCBB! I was paired with the wonderful @tricia-16 to illustrate for their amazing fic, Hearts Never Forget. do yourself a favor and give it a read, it’s easily become one of my favorites and illustrating for it was so fun! (please give a click for better quality, tumblr loves to ruin resolution).