#too many Catholics in this fandom not to have a ritualized holy day

[chekhovs-tantrum]

Soup Day: a proposal for a TLT fandom holiday

Because Mean Girls wear pink on October 3rd. Star Wars celebrates May the 4th. Hitchhikers and Discworld fans don towels and lilacs (respectively) on May 25th.

Locked Tomb friends, we need a holiday.

I propose that 9/9 of every year is Soup Day. We celebrate, of course, by consuming soups. We share photos, recipes, and if you have a group of irl bone bitches, the soup itself.

If you can’t eat soup, put bread in a drawer. If you can’t eat bread, stare in anguish at a cup of lukewarm tea while contemplating the ways your God has disappointed you. Use your own moral judgment on whether you consume cow products on that day, as cows do exhibit mourning behavior.

Anyways that’s my plan for dinner on September 9th and you’re all invited! 🖤🖤🖤 I’m telling everyone nice and early so you can start hoarding bones. For stock, of course.

[agarthanguide]

i'm obsessed with klimt!jester and byzantine!molly, my gosh. what wonderful ideas you had for all of them! how long did it take you to settle on each inspiration, and what other ideas did you almost go with?

This is a fun question.  Here’s how it went (behind the cut because this got so very long)-

Caleb happened first, and without any intention of doing a whole set. I wanted to try to do Van Gogh’s coloring thing, and Caleb seemed like a really good target.  It was deeply fun.

Beau- Hey, I like this Caleb piece!  What if I do art stuff for all of the M9? I wanna try those long inky LIchtenstein lines!  And what could go wrong?  Surely this won’t extend to two months of extensive research and work!

Molly- As soon as I decided to draw Beau, I knew I wanted Molly to be some highly iconographic thing with glorioles and gold leaf and things.  I have a longstanding fascination with Catholic and Orthodox iconography and gosh do I love messing with gold leaf.  Early concepts included some Fra Angelico action (he does this thing where you texture the gold leaf to create patterns in the frame, which i find absolutely stunning.  This is also a Big Look in 17th Century Spanish polychrome sculpture, which I obviously couldn’t pastiche directly, but wanted to reference, if the opportunity came up)-

I also considered going a bit Russian.  Russian iconography has probably the most opportunities for adding layers of symbolism (it just occurred to me that I probably would have needed to find someone who understood cyrillic to make it work)-

In the end, I was paging through a book of decorative motifs and was reminded of the Byzantine mosaics in Ravenna, which are probably the most iconic of the form outside of the Hagia Sophia. I decided that I’d probably have lots of other opportunities to paint, and I wanted to try my hand at a realistic tile look.

Caduceus- I thought of Mucha straight away, but I really didn’t want to do it, because I had already seen it done several times, and I thought those other artists had done really well, and that the concept was a closed book.  The other big concept was Picasso’s Old Guitarist-

It’s got the lankiness and the stylization and I love the pose, but in the end I just really thought that Caduceus was more Art Nouveau than expressionist.  Also my brother was really voting against any pose that included a profile, because I had never drawn Cad in anything other than profile.  So that cinched it.

Jester- I never considered anything else but Klimt. I tried hard to think of something else, because my last two brain cells have just enough self awareness to know that Klimt is way, way above me in terms of pattern and texture and motif, and I was pretty sure it was gonna be too difficult for me.  It was, by the way.  I stopped long before I wanted to and didn’t include a lot of what I had dreamed of adding.

Matt- Following my fascination with iconography, I still wanted to do the heavily painted, loaded with symbolism and rich color portrait that Molly wasn’t.  I looked at artists like Ghirlandaio, Castagno, and Jan van Eyck (I never considered Da Vinci, his sensitivity is way outside my orbit), but in the end I kept coming back to Holbein, who really raises the bar on color choice and symbolism. I love that all his portraits seem to be set in plain or dark spaces, but are somehow glowing and mysterious. I didn’t have the guts to put in a deep, perspective-y background, but omg I wish- 

I mean I’m not a fucking wizard.  But holy shit look at that.  The notes and crap hanging off the wall all look like clues.  Like Sherlock Holmes would be able to write the whole life story of this guy.  It’s almost trompe l’oeil.

Yasha- First concept for Yasha was a Minoan fresco from Knossos-

If I was designing Yasha’s tribe, I think I’d go for a melange of Mongolian and Minoan, throwing in some Tibetan textile patterns.  I just think this looks so much like her, and also some other Minoan frescoes include insane levels of ritualized badassery, like Bull Leaping and young girls offering saffron to incarnate goddesses.  I just love it. In the end, I was worried that the relative clean-ness and simplicity of the lines in the Minoan style would make it look like I was giving Yasha short shrift.  This feels a little ridiculous to me now, but I had just come off three in a row that took more than ten hours. My next thought was the Book of Hours of Joanna of Castile.  The thought here was that some of the pages actually look like Yasha’s book of pressed flowers-

This felt like a totally winning direction to me.  As I researched illuminated books more, though, my concept started to broaden and get more stylized, and I just went with it.  I think it turned out okay.

Fjord- Fjord is handsome and iconic, so the ideas flowed easily for him.  The first and most obvious was a Fabio-era (read- 80s to early 90s) romance novel cover-

I didn’t go with it because the Tusk Love thing meant that a lot of other artists had tried it already, and many of them had done a damn fine job, and I didn’t think that I had anything to add. The next concept was David’s Napoleon-

Very solid concept, but two issues- 1. Most portraits of Napoleon are pretty standard, in the mold of, say, Holbein, which I had already done.  2. The horse portrait is awesome, but I think Fjord had only been on horses circumstantially.  I couldn’t picture him on a horse. He’s not iconically horsey, he’s iconically sailor-y.  I can’t confirm whether or not he had a moorbounde when I painted this, but I know I hadn’t seen any of those episodes, yet.  So. All of this dithering kept going until the DAY I STARTED PAINTING.  And suddenly pulp cover fell out. I love pulp art.  This is the second fandom I’ve done pulp art covers for.

Nott- Full credit to @essayofthoughts, who came up with the playing card thing right at the get go.  I wasn’t sold, though, and floated two other concepts. First was a Mughal Miniature-

The thing about these is that they are very often like little comics.  On one side of the painting, you can have the main character at a lake, picking daisies or being drowned or whatever, and then on the other side that same character can be picking pockets in a crowded bar.  There’s loads of opportunity for detail and symbols and fun stuff like that.  On the other hand- I’m not a goddam genius.  I could not have taken in the style and substance of Mughal storytelling and then just spit it out in a few short weeks and done it any justice. Nope, that concept was just too difficult and too far above me.My other concept was Millais’ Ophelia-

This one might have been amazing, but the second half of the 19th century was getting very crowded indeed, with Caleb, Caduceus, and Jester all having concepts from that era.  That and I wanted something more graphic artsy than painty to round out the series.  Beau was starting to feel like an outlier and I wanted to loop her in closer to the bunch, if you know what I mean.

Okay that was a lot, but I apparently had a lot to share.  I hope you found the unused concepts interesting, at least.  What would you have done, were you me? I would love to hear outtakes from alternative universes.