Double Dutchess

Time to revive an oldie. Because 2020 sucked all over the world, I thought I'd revise and re-use the image below. The original version was made for noel_of_spike in 2016. That year also sucked, but on a smaller scale than 2020. I wish everybody a much better 2021!



Credits
Art by the late, amazing Franco Urru (slightly edited by me) from the IDW "After The Fall" comics
Virus image from pixabay

The next step of making the shoebox diorama was selecting, editing and printing the comics images I wanted to use. Luckily, the Thursday before the summer solstice was my first day back at my workplace, and this meant I could abuse the colour printer at work to print the images. I forgot to print a few of the images, so not all of them are full-colour (most notably the Klimt poster and Buffy’s scarf). I printed out most images in multiple sizes, because it was difficult to estimate the best size and I hadn’t had time to make exact measurements.

For the actual physical execution. I started with the most important piece, that of Buffy and Spike of the bed. I wanted to make the bed three dimensional, but there was no way I could do that with Buffy and Spike themselves. So this ended up as a bit of a strange mix of two and three dimensional (images 1 and 2). I did the same thing with the dresser: the dresser itself is three-dimensional, but the vase with flowers and the tissue box on top of it are two-dimensional. This can be clearly seen in image 1 below, which also shows the backside of the dresser (made of the same cardboard box as the bed).



Image 1: top view of the diorama in the making.( Rest of the "Making Of" under the cut. )

Hey, how are you all doing? I'm having some time off work (well, more or less) and finally finding the time to post some things to LJ. Starting with the shoebox diorama of Buffy and Spike's bedroom that I made for the Summer Solstice free-for-all over at seasonal_spuffy. With thanks to teragramm for the term “diorama” term, which sounds a bit grandiose to my ears, but so much better than “peepbox” which I used originally.

( Shoebox diorama under the cut. )

New artwork featuring our two favourite vampires, made for two challenges over at Buffyforums. There is some nudity, but nothing that wasn't seen in the show, so it should be SFW.

The first challenge was from buffylover about the Buffyverse comics, with as prompts "Your best colour", "Your best Panel" and "The best character". Because of lack of time, I tried to be efficient by answering addressing all three of them in one go. Since my favourite character is Spike and my favourite comics artist is Franco Urru (RIP) I took a panel from Spike: After the Fall showing Spike being all badass, and I recoloured it. For the new colour palette I took my inspiration from my favourite colourist, Fabio Mantovani. He coloured, among other things, the final parts of Angel:AtF and the first parts of the IDW Spike series. After a first, less successful attempt this is what I eventually came up with:

( Spike in Hell-A (recoloured) )

The second challenge was by Nina, "The Masters of the Low Countries". The idea was to take inspiration from/reuse parts of a painting by one of seven famous painters from the Low Countries (The Netherlands and Belgium). Since I've always loved the unlimited imagination of Jeroen Bosch, I took my inspiration from his famous three-paneled painting "The Garden of Earthly Delights", and in particular the Hell panel. Here, we see Angel in Hell, being tortured by Bosch' delightful little monsters:

( Angel in Jeroen Bosch's Hell )

Warning, comics spoilers ahead!

( Vid, limerick and art below the cut (spoilers!) )