⚠️ A/N: This artwork contains MAJOR PLOT SPOILERS for the story so if you wish to read first you can find it here (I recommend that you do! It’s a long story tho, so give yourself plenty of time. I shall wait patiently if you want to come back here afterwards and relive the goodness 😄🤗)
Below you can find the pictures I drew and a look behind the scenes at my processes. 😊
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Story Details
Title: Limbo
Author:EnTeSelene
Artist:MidnightSilver
Pairings: Sam/Dean
Rating: Explicit
Additional tags: Graphic Descriptions of Violence. Canon Divergent season 2 AHBL. Canon-Typical Violence, nightmares, night terrors, wet dreams, horror, a pinch of gore, original characters, hurt Sam, pining Sam, pining Dean, misunderstandings, the boys should TALK more and take stuff for granted less. Sleep psychology
Word Count: 65 K
Summary: When Sam Winchester wakes up in the ICU at Sioux Falls General Hospital, recovering from life-threatening injuries and worrisome memory loss, he is plagued by questions he cannot answer. What happened to him? Why isn't Dean by his side? What is buried so deep in his memory that he’s afraid to recall but surfaces to haunt him in his nightmares?Sam isn’t sure of anything except for this: He will recover, track down his brother, and find out what monumentally stupid thing Dean did to keep him alive. In search of answers, Sam agrees to take part in a dream research study, but this puts him in the very danger Dean tried to keep him safe from. The brothers must navigate the potent forces of the dreamworld and their own hidden desires, to find one another and save the day - and restore the balance of their relationship.
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My Artwork
Cover:
Artwork:
Chapter Sketches
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Behind the scenes and my art process
We were short on time due to the very quick turnaround of the bang this year. This beautiful and evocative epic story was packed with so much that I wanted to draw, but unfortunately I had to limit myself to 2 scenes. (something i was very sad about! 😭 EnTeSelene's story played like a HD cinematic masterpiece in my minds eye as I read. I could have drawn every other sentence if given the chance, but I had nowhere near enough time for that 😅😂). So I tried to pick moments that encapsulated key elements of the story.
I started with Sam in Limbo. For this I needed a good strong hero-pose!Sam reference picture 😁:
Next I needed to fill Limbo with nightmares:
Funnels open and close for Sam—a girl yelling her lungs out under a raging storm, a boy crying and clutching his mom’s twisted hands to his chest as they become wood, a man burning like a torch, a woman drowning in a dirty lake, a little boy running away from his drunken father who has a belt gripped in hands that are turning into claws. Murky, inarticulate images of which Sam cannot make any sense (and are even scarier for it) mingle with serial killers, rapists, abusers, and people suddenly realizing they are naked in the middle of the street or frantically searching for something essential they have lost, but Sam doesn’t give up.
I drafted the nightmares into individual images, trying to capture the essence of each fear.
Then I arranged them around Sam who is searching for his brother.
The nightmares appear in funnels, like twisters, and I wasn't sure how I wanted to capture that effect. Each individual image needed to appear in its own vortex (like a swirling mirage) and I wanted to get a sense of that, but with so many nightmares surrounding Sam I didn’t want to make the composition too busy. So in the end I settled on a more abstract style of vortex that didn’t overcrowd the picture.
To add a little sense of movement to the image I made a GIF by adding a glow effect to Sam. If I had more time I would have made the nightmares individually appear in twisty swirly vortexes but have them drift along sideways and fade in and out, one at a time. Unfortunately it was too big a project for me to fit in before posting, so glowy Sam was as much as I could do.
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Picture 2:
For my second picture I started by modelling Sam and Dean in Magic Poser (my 3D Modelling app.) That gave me a reference for the anatomy.
Then I started drawing the scene in Procreate but again I had no idea how i was going to capture the effect I wanted. In the story the boys are at the center of a swirl of power, like a fire storm. It was so wonderful to watch it play out in my mind as I read:
Sam feels when the spell takes—a sharp pain as if the incantation were ripping his rib cage open to shred his heart in two, but Sam endures the pain and keeps his lips on his brother's. A fiery flow pours from his chest into Dean's to be countered with an icy void, and Dean seizes in Sam’s arms. The two forces collide, and it’s like two tides crashing into each other. For a few, agonizing seconds, Sam fears that the opposing forces will tear them to shreds, but the currents mix as if two oceans were mingling by communicating vessels, and then there is quiet and a wondrous sense of balance, of rightness. It is as it was meant to be.
My Draft:
Below are some progress pictures of painting the details for the boys. In the second image you can see that I have hovered my reference pictures around the image so that I can check my details as I paint:
After I had painted the boys I drew the lighting effect in gold and then used the liquify tool to draw swirls through the gold. (Its kinda like pulling a stick through an oil spill on water - and it gave a wonderful trailing effect.) I used a light pen on top to add some sparkles and more squiggles, and below is my final result:
Its not exactly as I saw it in my mind. What I see in my mind for this scene is volcanoes exploding, tidal waves consuming everything in their path, super-heated centers of galaxies birthing stars, the cosmos exploding into life in a big bang and choreographing a dance that would birth every possibility - all wrapped around two brothers through which it flows and twirls in perfect harmony. 🥰 sigh. What I have drawn for you all is some pretty lights 🤷🏻♂️😂 unfortunately I just couldn’t figure out a way to draw this cosmic light show and still capture the devastation of the background (and it’s beauty) and still keep the boys at its center. (Maybe if I had time to make a gif? 😂 I love that gifs let me show more that a single static image. Why settle for one concept when you can cram multiple concepts into a moving picture? But alas again, I had no time 😭.)
I did have time to make a gif with a little added sparkle though, because even a Little touch of magic is better than non 😁.
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Cover:
For the cover I wanted to revisit the idea of the nightmare funnels because I hadn't captured it exactly in my first image. So I used an inspiration picture of swirling clouds that EnTeSelene had proved and drew light and dark clouds converging on a point. I drafted out Sam and Dean to go in the foreground but I ran into a bit of trouble, The reference picture that I liked most for Sam (the tilt of his head and his expression) had Sam too old for the story, so I needed to de-age him as I refined my details. It didn't go to plan 😅. I had changed something about the arrangement of his face and now I couldn't figure out what was wrong. Normally when this happens to me I put the project down for several days and when I come back I see the work with fresh eyes and can figure out what is wrong. There was no time for that here though so in the end I just had to redraw him.
And once Sam was doing better I of course made a gif and some colour variations for EnTeSelene to choose from 😁
Chapter Titles
I used the same font from the cover to make the Chapter Titles
Chapter Pictures
And that should have been it, but my brain woke me up at 2am 2 days before posting and insisted that I make tiny little chapter sketches to go with the titles and since I actually do enjoy sleep and my Muse wasn’t going to let my brain turn off until I had it all planned out - well, here you go, bonus chapter sketches 😄
Page Break Icon
And to end (fr this time) I drew the Samulet as a page break.
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And that's all for this art set folks 😄
I hope you enjoyed my art and the peek behind the scenes.
A big thank you again to EnTeSelene for writing a story that will play over and over in my mind for eternity. Thank you for that and for also for being amazing to work with 🤗🤗.
➡️ If you still haven't read the story (go do it! Clear your schedule, settle in somewhere comfy and dive into the goodness. You will be blown away!) and you want to check it out, you can find it here
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Kudos and comments are food for an artist’s soul. I love hearing your reactions to the art 😄
You all stay awesome my friends and ill catch you again soon! 💛
-Midnight
