Two years ago during lockdown, I spent my time creating Aziraphale's bookshop using cardboard and various other random materials I had lying around, creating this piece which I could slot into my bookshelf (now it sits next to my growing collection of @neil-gaiman works).
In celebration of Good Omens Season 2, I decided to post pictures of the completed project and the process here! It's my first time posting on tumblr, so forgive me if I'm a bit green.
Details and process below!
Before we ever got to see what was on the bookshop's upper floor, I imagined a bedroom, perhaps lived-in. Maybe a certain demon had moved in, along with their plants?
The teeny pride flag in the window is one of the subtle ways I sneak in a celebration of pride into my room, away from homophobic prying eyes.
My favourite details! I printed out both signs on Aziraphale's door, the images of which I believe I got from fans that posted them online.
Due to poor planning on my part, I started making this flower shop as well before I knew how it would fit in with the bookshop. In the end, they remained separate pieces. There was even a mini chalkboard sign for the flowershop, which I have no idea where it has disappeared to now.
It all started out in August 2020, when I put pencil to paper. Initially I wanted to create a street view, with the bookshop and flower shop on either sides. But honestly my brain was too small to figure out how that worked, so it didn't happen.
The most fun part was folding the tiny paper books. The least fun? Cutting rectangles out of cardboard and painstakingly gluing them down to resemble bricks.
Painting was alright, but on closer examination, the walls were all of different colours due to my inconsistent paint mixing. To ensure that what was essentially a cardboard façade of the bookshop could stand on its own, I created a pavement with added flowering shrubs and a lamp post. The street sign on the lamp post says 'Garden of Eden', which I now know should have been Whickber Street :)
And that's it! I believe I spent ~62 hours working on and off on it, and it certainly kept my lockdown blues at bay.
All I had were some cardboard, some foam, lots of hot glue and a dream (trust me, you don’t want to see how the back looks like). I never expected all the kindness and love I received on this, so thank you <3
The criticality of “choice” in the Sandman is such an interesting thing when it comes to Dream. It’s most present in his conversations with Hob - “it is your choice how you live your life” / “the choice is yours - would you take that choice from others?”. It also appears in his rescue of Calliope. He doesn’t make a move until he has her permission to act. And, of course, it is present in his encounter with John Dee. There is a repeated thread of choice and how important it is. The fascinating aspect is how Dream doesn’t think he can allow the same for himself. He tells his creations that he does not choose how he lives nor are they permitted to choose to change. There is a blind spot when it comes to being Endless. And when Lucianne attempts to point out that “it wouldn’t be the first time one of the Endless…” he shuts her down immediately. He cannot envision an existence where he gets to choose a different path. However I do think his imprisonment had a profound impact on that tightly held view - though in making him cling to it in seemingly a frantic way. He was deeply affected by the suffering of the dreamers when he couldn’t carry out his duty. And when he fought John Dee it was only the dreamers that mattered - not himself. Choice is crucial except when it comes to himself. Though it’s obvious there are small cracks forming in that view by the end of season 1.
Ohohoho I LOVE “fuck around and find out” signs, especially the really dramatic and ominous (but true) ones
(Context for the last one: it’s a WWII era sign posted around the soldiers’ washroom mirror, warning them to never discuss military plans in places where civilians could hear them and report back to the enemy, e.g. in restaurants and pubs in the country. “Loose lips sink ships”.)
I also love these two, which I would place in the category of “You already fucked around, now you’re about to find out.”
Aerated water is fucking scary. It's water that has a fuckton of gas in it, which reduces the buoyancy to the point where you will immediately start to sink if you fall in.
Human connections were never easy when I was alive. And now that I'm dead, they seem to bring somehow even more baggage. There are these feelings that I'm not used to. I thought those feelings were never to be spoken of. But once you have them… it's hard to hold them back. And that terrifies me.
The text on the right is a quote from the song 米店 by 張瑋瑋: 'You have an apple in one hand / and fate in the other.' The title on the cover of the small book is Sandman.
A couple notes:
The little book Destiny is holding is a 連環畫, a popular form of comic books in the Sinophone in the 20th century.
In case you're wondering why I didn't draw a chain: red thread of fate (I've taken the symbolism one step further of course. We're all connected to one another in some way. Who says only lovers can be tied together by a red string? And if the web of connections among all of us isn't destiny, I don't know what is.)
Imagine how much scarier zombie movies would be if the zombies smiled when they saw you because they were excited to finally eat. Imagine walking into a building to go and find shelter, scavenge, whatever, and you shine your flashlight into a room only to find several zombies idling there. Your light catches their eyes and they turn to look at you, their expressions desolate and empty. However, the moment they spot you, their open mouths turn to wide uncontrollable smiles and their eyes disappear into slits. They almost look friendly. Maybe even some of them manage to laugh instead of groan. How would you feel after months and months of losing people you know to smiling hoards? How would you feel after every encounter with a joyful zombie leaves you shaken and tired and fearful? How would you feel after hearing the sounds of laughter mixed in with the sounds of screaming and flesh being torn? After everything, what would your brain's wiring process do to you when you see a friend smile? Would you hate smiling? Would you feel rage? Would your brain devolve back into a time where showing one's teeth always meant a threat? What would you do if the joy of the human race was now only kept by the dead
When you lose your brother to the zombie, when u see them again and they smile at you with that wide toothy grin that reminds you of them when y'all were kids, the way he smiles when he's his latest art piece he drew of you.
And you get lost in the smile, because it reminds you of how easy times were then, how you don't have to be fighting tooth and nail to simply survive. You could join him, let him take you because you love him and you failed to protect him, so the last thing you could do was to appease him one last time. You take in his smile and you memorise it, resigned to let him take you.
But the moment you feel his cold decaying hand touch you, the rosy tint around you disappears. The instinct to survive suddenly claws at you and you immediately start scrabbling backwards. You realise the smile on his face is not the innocent smile you remember, it's terrifying. The skin is pulled beyond what a normal human can, like it was pulled and held by pins. The smile rips apart at his face, essentially about to tear off the seams. The smell of rot overpowers you as you see the skin peeling around your brother's lips, exposing the jawbones. And god the stench, painfully reminding you that he is no longer your brother. You scream and you run backwards, unable to tear your eyes away from what remains of him.
Your brother, no, the zombie, senses that your running and leaps towards you. On his fours he scrabble towards you, his mouth opening so wide you can see the peeling skin tethering to his cheekbones rip apart like seams. As he gets closer, you can hear the throaty laugh that reverberates through his exposed right ribcage while his lungs expand and contract rapidly.
Maybe the sight of this finally scares you. For you finally peel your eyes away from the creature and run as fast as you can. Ignoring other laughters that echo at your sides, ignoring the way your lungs are screaming with life, you run, run right out of the abandoned shop and towards the streets. You run back straight to your bunker, slamming the door shut as u hurry down to the open drain cover and straight into the tunnels. Only when the drain cover was tightly secured and the pounding in your heart stills to a silence solace, you collapse onto the floor, panting and trying to calm yourself.
And when take your hands to wipe the dirt off your face, you notice that you've been crying all along.
