Helloo @sugarhog05 !! It is I, your Secret Santa!! I'm back again to. Ramble at you. I've been itching to talk about this one >:3
Firstly, I want to say that your Leviathan Express au is so fricking cool! I got so excited when I looked through it for the first time. I knew that I wanted to do this one!
That being said, I had the hardest time! There were periods when I just sat there kicking rocks because I couldn't get it to look the way I wanted. It was quite the challenge.
I liked your Sun, so I decided to go with the "serving hot chocolate" prompt! Here are some ROUGH beginning sketches to get an idea of how I wanted to do it:
"POV blorbo interact with you" is where I started. He was originally going to hand the hot chocolate to the viewer, but I guess that wasn't hard enough for me. (I will pay for this.)
I scrapped it all and went to my drawing tablet to get those ideas flowing! I ended up with this!
Yeessss YEESSS COMPLEXITIES!! A DIFFERENT ANGLE!! A CHALLENGE! Sun will hand hot chocolate out to passengers while the viewer gets a good view of the train and the Hot CHOCOLATE PLATTERR!!
I STARTED!!
and then..
I stopped.
I didn't like it. Something wasn't clicking. Lord knows what it was.
Soo I ditched it all again and tried something else! I figured it was because I wasn't having enough fun with the shapes and colors, so I took a different approach:
Mmhhmmyes very shapey. This is good...
but at this point I realized I had no fricking clue what the express actually looked like. This is bad.
The best reference I found was here. WOW! This is a beautiful train! I love all the intricate details! I used it to make these:
If I learned anything from this, it is that I can't make a decision AND stick with it to save my life... because I ran away from this one and went BACK to the original. Drawing and rendering all those seats at an angle intimidated me. I hide in shame.
..So I'm back in the building again. I added myself as one of the passengers as a sort of "jingle jingle keys" thing to keep me going (because at this point it was getting late).
Oh, hey! There's the seat I drew! It would come in handy after all!
I was in a rush because I got times mixed up and thought it was already due. I stayed up until 3am finishing it in a call with a friend encouraging me. (thank you @tingremlin)
If I had known I had a whole extra week, I would've spent a lot more time on the background! I might go back and fix it up anyway.
Thank you for making this wonderful au for me to clench my bloodthirsty jaws onto :3 It is reeeaallyy cool :333 I love the designs :333333 I hope good food comes your way!!
