#I also saw on twitter that the eye might be from that one artbook

[four-eyed-floozy]

Houseki spoilers, you know the deal

[bladelineage]

sword of frost concept art

think of this post as kinda a little artbook for the fic! sword of frost underwent a ton of revisions like i keep saying so i wasnt entirely sure where to take it at first. not to mention writing is v hard for me so my preferred method of brainstorming was drawing! without further ado. writer’s commentary and an artbook :)

to begin with: originally the fic was supposed to be about void dream instead of the snow queen! the idea being that dante was put to sleep by void dream and faust manifested her personal ego to save him- but i ended up going with snow queen bc i saw some sick art on twitter of someone’s employee saving another from snow queen (i wish i had the link bc it was rlly cool, and i’d like to credit them in some way) and i decided that might be a little easier to write for, surprisingly.

up next we have the art for chapter 1! there wasn’t a lot of it but just the stuff i wanted to do with it. i wanted to make this a bigger piece but having to like. paint the prisms pissed me off so i decided against it lmao. the reason for dante wandering into the containment in the first place was originally supposed to be that an employee’s lamp weapon enchanted him from afar and he kept chasing the light until he came upon the snow queen, but i realized he could also. just walk in there on his own lol

the actual csp file containing the layout of the facility + the groups i split everyone into was unfortunately lost in a computer moment so. its just the main group here! i chose everyone based on who i wanted to write and interpret- nothing against the other sinners, i had just been itching to write these ones in particular.

The Fight. i rlly like how i did this one still! writing this scene was also super fun bc i got to use my imagination and mimic how the movements would go :)

but now here’s the wildin part: chapter 2 was supposed to be very different! originally the idea was that dante woke up fine, but changed. kinda like how in the original tale of the snow queen kai became jaded and hated everything he saw, bc the mirror was in his eyes and the snow queen was the only thing he found beautiful- dante was supposed to become competent and uncaring, but hollow inside. the little shard of ice inside his heart wasn’t fully gone, and a kiss could undo it! i found myself struggling with how to pull that off in a satisfying way so i opted for something cooler instead, bc i wanted to make the fic less predictable and maybe more memorable.

there was supposed to be a scene in dante’s office, so i wanted to imagine what it would look like! plus a brief sketch of an ego based on the roses

dante was supposed to unbutton his shirt a little and reveal the ice shard still lodged in there (bc the Tension yknow?) and ryoshu and faust talking abt how dante’s clearly changed.

cool art of the shard from when i wanted to practice single color shading that i liked quite a lot!!

yoink! the plan was always for a kiss to thaw the ice but i wanted to do something cool and dramatic for art that night i think.

now abt this point i realized i wanted to do something different, so i went back to an EGO dante thing i made for a server request! i absolutely loved how i did this one, so it ended up being the basis for his corroded form in chapter 2.

as for the final bits of concept art, it was mostly from when i decided to change chapter 2- just stuff to plan the actual concept and get it down before i started writing.

i ended up not liking the second “redesign” of the corroded form as much, so i went with the one i drew before. and finally. the art i posted of snow queen dante not long before i finished the fic proper!

so that was sword of frost! v interesting to write but certainly will not be my last limbus fic lmao. i hope to get more things done before the game drops!