#speary

[scripscrim]

always wondered if it hurt

day 26

[pokechars]

Here’s something nice that happened in yesterday’s new “Pokemon Journeys” episode. In one of the first scenes of the episode, we see two people exchanging their Pokemon in the Vermillion City Pokemon Center. A Gentleman trades his Farfetch’d (nicknamed Oshou) for a little girl’s Spearow (nicknamed Onichan). Avid Pokemon players have likely recognized the scene as a reference to the memorable Spearow-for-Farfetch’d in-game trade that happens in Vermillion City in the original Gen I games. But there’s apparently more to this...

Oshou is the Japanese name of Dux, the original in-game trade Pokemon from Pokemon Red and Blue that a little girl (named Elyssa in FRLG) trades for the player’s Spearow. Dux reappears in LGPE in the very same house in Vermillion, but this time it’s not traded. His owner, this time a Gentleman, expresses his will to catch a Spearow. You may ask why they changed Dux’s owner from a little girl to a Gentleman. Possible answer is that it’s a reference to the Pokemon Trader TCG card from Gen I times.

Onichan, in turn, is the Japanese name of Speary, the Spearow owned by a little girl and her father in a house in Viridian City. The house serves mainly as a demonstration of the Pokemon nicknaming mechanism and appears in all core games that feature Kanto. In Johto-based games, Speary is joined by a Rattata nicknamed Rattey.

So yeah, we have a reference to two in-game Pokemon and the NPCs who own them (ironically, none of these two are the original in-game trader from Gen I). If you ever wished for these NPCs to appear in the anime, your wish has just been granted.

Now let's hope that the English dub doesn't screw this up and catches the Pokemon nicknames as Dux and Speary. Otherwise, this entire scene loses its sense. Also, I hope that the anime keeps adding such cute and easy-to-miss game references. They’re incredibly nice to spot.

[whichstiel]

What do space, astronauts, cowboys, and the southwestern US have in common? They are all one billion percent MY JAM. I was thrilled to claim Speary's story, Space Cowboy, for this year's DCBB. Her story is an action-packed adventure with lots of favorite side characters and a wonderful portrayal of Cas and Dean. Here's the summary:

A portal showed up near the space station Calliope, signaling the beginning of an adventure that would span worlds. When Sam and Dean Winchester’s spaceship, the Impala, is pulled through the portal, seemingly disappearing forever, it becomes the mission of one risk-taking Commander Castiel Novak to find the Winchesters and their ship, fight Leviathans, and bring them home.

Read it on AO3!

As soon as I read the art claim summary, I knew I wanted to do bright, almost cartoonish paper art for this project. The first challenge was to design a spaceship that might evoke the Impala. My author suggested the SpaceX rocket as a model. Using that as a base, I sketched out some potential ideas for Baby-as-spaceship.

Designing the cover is often my first step to set a tone for the pieces. I knew I wanted to have an astronaut and cowboy on the cover, so that was the first thing I designed. I took several pictures, but the ones that worked best were taken in bright sunlight. The days are getting pretty short here, so probably one of the most difficult scheduling tasks with this art was finding time to photograph when it was actually sunny so I could capture the richest color and sharpest shadows.

I tried to use the same cartoonish technique for the next scene - the rift in space. But it really didn't work out very well. I'd seen some examples of paper art (or maybe faux-paper-actually-digital art) which showed lovely cartoonish layers of space. That...really didn't work out for me so well. It was confusing...am I looking at a planet? Did I make a mistake?

I ended up scrapping the background, keeping the Impala and the space station. I looked up YouTube videos on how to paint galaxy patterns and one night I got out my paints and some leftover black cardstock and gave it a try. I'm pretty happy with how it turned out! (Although the art critic in me complains that I didn't use painting in any of the other pieces, so how does it match?)

The main space/rift setup is set on top of a frame and there's a flashlight underneath to add a little extra strip of light to the barely-there planet. This was photographed in sunshine, which produced the least amount of glare on the somewhat glossy paint and gave me truer colors of the paper pieces.

The next scene I tackled was the campfire kiss. I'm a huge sucker for a silhouette picture, so this was a fun one to do. The top silhouette is taped to the top of a shadowbox frame and I've got a couple of lights shining underneath to illuminate the sky. I tried several shots of this picture in sunshine, but it made everything too bright and washed out the silhouette. I found I got the best silhouette by taking the picture inside on a bright sunny day. The indirect light helped with the camera focus, and the flashlights underneath illuminated only what I wanted to show.

I've been trying to work smaller lately because I love little bitty artworks. This next one was an attempt to make a small image and convey a scene using minimal lines. I loved the idea of an airship settling in a valley in the middle of the mountains. This was a fun, colorful project to work on during an otherwise very rainy weekend afternoon.

The last piece, the divider, is the Impala, of course! I know saguaro cacti aren't native to southern Utah, which is the terrain Speary modeled Mars after, but I've always loved the look of them. They're such iconic desert plants. They're also the only recognizable cactus that can grow as high as a spaceship!

This was a great project to try some new things and play with color a little bit. Speary was wonderful to work with and her story is so much fun! Give it a read today :)

[scripscrim]

the most important message

day 23 late

[destielfanfictions]

Heart by Speary

Rating: Mature

Word count: 90,254

Summary: The heart is a funny thing. Some say it loves, and others say that it is just a muscle, keeping you alive for some minuscule amount of time. For Cas Shurley, the heart was a defective reminder that each day was maybe going to be his last. For years he had been in and out of hospitals. For years he had viewed time as something trickling down the drain. Then Sam Winchester died. He died, and Cas got to live. And in what universe was that fair? But he accepted the gift, and told himself that he would live. Each beat of Sam’s heart in his chest was an anthem, a siren song beckoning him back to life.This new heart though, wanted him to do more than just live. This heart had a story to tell. It would wake him up in the night, and visit him with cold drafts and a sense of purpose that would propel him out of bed. But before he could truly live and act on the demands of his new heart, he would have to get out of the hospital, and he would have to meet the Winchester family. And though he didn’t know it, he would especially have to meet Dean, Sam’s brother. And meeting him would remind him of just how much more there was to life than just the living.

[ao3feed-destiel]

All Your Lies

read it on the AO3 at http://ift.tt/2gdx0SB

by Speary

When Sam is captured in East Berlin, in the summer of 1953, there is some fear that he’ll be lost to them forever. However, Agent Dean Winchester catches a lucky break. His agency has captured a KGB agent. They’ve negotiated prisoner exchanges before, but only after they had extracted what secrets they could. And Dean has enviable skills when it comes to interrogations. His prisoner, Dmitri Krushnic, though, seems to know too much, and he also seems to be somehow familiar. The more time he spends with the prisoner, the more questions he has, about the past, about what he lost in the war, and about the truth that he wasn’t ready to see.

Words: 30664, Chapters: 3/8, Language: English

Fandoms: Supernatural

Rating: Not Rated

Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply

Categories: F/M, M/M

Characters: Dean Winchester, Castiel, Bobby Singer, Garth Fitzgerald IV, Crowley (Supernatural), Sam Winchester, Karen Singer, Uriel (Supernatural), Andrea Kormos, Benny Lafitte, Charlie Bradbury, Fergus MacLeod, Jimmy Novak, Victor Henriksen, Dmitri Krushnic - Character

Relationships: Castiel/Dean Winchester, Bobby Singer/Karen Singer, Past Dean/Crowley

Additional Tags: Destiel - Freeform, Community: deancasbigbang, DCBB, Spy Dean, Spy Castiel, Alternate Universe - 1950s, Alternate Universe - 1940s, Canon-Typical Violence, Two period typical slurs, Dmitri Krushnic - Freeform, New York, Berlin - Freeform, England - Freeform, Art By Impalaartsociopath, Angst and Feels

read it on the AO3 at http://ift.tt/2gdx0SB

[ao3feed-destiel]

I Failed You

read it on the AO3 at http://ift.tt/2eajCOb

by Speary

Dean, Mary, and Cas are on the road, searching for Sam. They stop for a night at a dingy motel to rest before the next fight.

--- Coda 12x1

Words: 2381, Chapters: 1/1, Language: English

Fandoms: Supernatural

Rating: General Audiences

Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply

Categories: M/M

Characters: Dean Winchester, Castiel, Mary Winchester

Relationships: Castiel/Dean Winchester

Additional Tags: Destiel - Freeform, Coda, 12x1, First Kiss, Canon Compliant

read it on the AO3 at http://ift.tt/2eajCOb

[ao3feed-destiel]

Waking Life

read it on the AO3 at http://ift.tt/2dbAIxT

by Speary

They were back to hunting, back together, back to being a team, plus one. They fought hard together, Mary perhaps harder than all of them combined, but that wasn't enough to keep Dean from noticing that Cas was gone. It wasn't enough to keep him from praying for that to change. It wasn't enough to keep him from dreaming a world of lies in which he was there, right there to stay.

Then he woke up, and he wasn't alone.

--- Dean was about to move them into a room. It was a dream after all, and things could work out that way if you wanted it badly enough. You could lie to yourself in dreams and say you got a key to a room down the hall, that you were in it alone while your mom and kid brother slept elsewhere without worrisome injuries. You could say that you wanted something like this, the stable, anchoring touch of your best friend. You could say that you wanted all of it, the long drawn out life together that seemed too domestic to wish for in the daylight. You could want this in dreams. You could.

Words: 2482, Chapters: 1/1, Language: English

Fandoms: Supernatural

Rating: Mature

Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply

Categories: M/M

Characters: Dean Winchester, Castiel, Mary Winchester, Sam Winchester

Relationships: Castiel/Dean Winchester

Additional Tags: Destiel - Freeform, Season/Series 12, Speculation, First Kiss, Dreamwalking, First Time, POV Dean Winchester, Castiel in the Bunker

read it on the AO3 at http://ift.tt/2dbAIxT