h/d erised reveals!!!

[nerakrose]

hd_erisedreveals are up!! HERE!! this naturally means i can claim my entry and reply to comments (quick question though: does the HP fandom at large know that anonymous creators can actually reply to works on AO3, or is the reason why nobody replies to comments until after reveals a holdover from LJ? a HP fandom tradition, as it were?).

i've got 65 comments to reply to, though, so i'm :'''''D avoiding that, because i don't know that i'll be able to actually give coherent replies. batches of 5-10 comments at a time, yeah?

ANYWAY. I MADE A THING! i made art! you can view it on LJ or on AO3.

several commenters mentioned being curious about the process, so...below the cut, The Process.

my recipient, the lovely oldenuf2nb, requested kisses, which was a-ok with me because i'd been working on improving my drawing, particularly with kisses. kisses are GREAT, i love kisses, but they are SO HARD. at the same time, i had this idea i wanted to play with beads, as i'd also recently completed a paint-by-the-numbers artwork with beads and had been completely mesmerised by it.

so, first step: draw kisses and figure out a away to transform that into something that can incorporate beads.
All things i considered/tried out to varying degrees: putting beads on top of a pencil drawing, putting beads on top of a painting, ditching beads and doing digital painting, going back to beads and pencil drawings, putting a scan and/or digital drawing into a cross-stitch pattern software, etc etc and in the end it became abundantly clear to me that however i put it, kisses would be murked up by the beads. it is both a forgiving medium as well as not forgiving at all: if you have a clear, distinct image with high contrast or bold colours and few small details, that will translate well, but detailed images will not.

so i started over and went and looked at all the porn blogs i follow on tumblr in search for something that wasn't too raunchy, simple, conveyed a kind of intimacy that could be comparable to kisses, etc. since i wasn't doing kisses anymore i decided to go the other direction and pick something that was intentionally ambitious: are they in a club? are they at home? is the colour the result of reflecting light and shadows, or just the artist being weird? who's who? i wanted to leave a lot of the interpretation up to the viewer (and as a result, had a lot of fun when the comments came in and people declared one or the other to be harry or draco...success!)
I found a few photos with potential, that i then put through photoshop to overlay with bold andy warhol-esque colours. i picked one i liked, cropped it, and then put it through the cross-stitch software. that software absolutely killed all the colours, and when i printed out the resulting image to work off, my printer took care of the rest. \o/



the software also killed some of the detail, but that was to be expected. some i could correct, some i didn't (which is why the lip in the finished product looks a bit odd...that was originally a tongue).


that wasn't even the FUN part.

i had a piece of flat wood, painted black, that i was going to use as a base, but it turned out (after i spent hours fiddling with the cross-stitch software and adjusting number of stitches (number of beads) that i'd printed the WRONG image, which was...too large to fit onto the board. the board could hold 93x93 beads. the image i had printed was 121x121 beads. (this works out to 14.641 beads, btw.) at this point i'd also already done the colour-picking and bead-matching and did not want to start over.

in hindsight, i probably should've just sucked it up and started over, because......i did not have anything half as sturdy as that piece of wood. the sturdiest thing i had was some fairly sturdy wrapping paper, but i didn't even have cardboard, which would've been better. did i want to go to three different shops spread all over the city in search for a new piece of wood after i'd already been to seven different shops buying every single bead packet they had? no. should i have made the effort to find cardboard? probably. anyway, i did not do those things and thus followed three weeks of Regret^TM.

i used decoupage glue (dries up clear and shiny) to glue the beads to the paper, the paper, naturally, warped. IT FRICKING WARPED. i managed to somehow fix it a little bit but it's still glaringly obvious and i have so many regrets. it has been months and i still look at this thing and just sink into a hole of REGRET. i am so sorry.

anyway, the beauty of using the cross-stitch software is that it gives you a grid to work off off! i marked off 10x10 grids off that grid (the far left and bottom most rows were 11x10), cut up some passepartout frames i had randomly lying about, and SET TO WORK. below: a collection of snaps i sent to epithalamium as i worked on this thing (over the course of about 3 weeks). it took me about an hour to complete a 10x10 bead square and i put in about 3-4 hours on this every day. let's all take a moment to thank D for suffering this with me, because if they hadn't, i'm not sure i'd have come out the other side entirely sane.

i was working off 25 different colours (but had about 40-45 differently coloured beads) and i put them in little plastic trays, 2 or 3 different colours together. NOT ONCE DID I ACCIDENTALLY UPEND A PLASTIC TRAY AND SEND BEADS FLYING. NOT ONCE. twice i did accidentally shove at a tray a little harder than i should've so the beads got a bit mixed up, but that was no big deal. give me a round of applause, guys. all these beads! and they stayed in their little trays! VICTORY.







i changed the colour composition of the beads for the teeth from the original, because the original wanted me to use yellows?? what even. i decided it wouldn't look great, so i used three white beads in place of the three yellow ones and also swapped one of the pink ones out for a pale grey bead.



let's just ignore how i accidentally used the wrong colour purple for the inner purple (surrounding the pink) in that row, yeah? :'''''D i tried to fix it in photoshop (the beads wouldn't come off the paper. i'd been too good at glueing them on. :'''D) but it didn't look great so eventually just hoped that nobody would notice. i hope nobody noticed. I NOTICE.









i ran out of that warm purple in the pec, that continues down the torso (as seen in the cross stitch image). GROSS MISCALCULATION. i thought i had enough of that purple, but nope. i almost used up all of it just on that pec. WHAT DO??? turned out i had SO MUCH TEAL. SO MUCH. and i'd only used it for that "accent" near the armpit, and that i could likely just continue that colour down the torso in place of the purple...so that's what i did.



:''''D WHY SO MANY MISCALCULATIONS. god, this entire project was riddled with miscalculations from start to finish. i'll tell you why: I'M A MASTER OF ARTS. last time i had math classes was in like 2005. i was in high school then. i know how to calculate what "70% off everything on this rack!" means but can i do basic math to save my life? evidently not. my humanities degrees have eradicated any and all brain space that once contained math skills.

anyway, i fixed that by blending in some orange-ish beige-ish beads with the pink to kind of gradually replace it, as seen in the finished product. all that pink is gone.





i, uh, also changed some of the other colours. i don't remember why. maybe it was just that the torso was TOO PURPLE for my liking. i have no idea. it's been months. i'm not the same person i once was.



i'm dead inside





i cut the rest of the wrapping paper off at the edge, and then went over the back of the dark areas with a heavy duty black marker. the beige paper was showing through too much on the dark areas T_T the whole thing was intended to be on a black piece of wood to start with so i considered going over ALL of it with the black marker, but decided that would have a detrimental effect on the really light areas (like the cheek).

as you can see, when comparing the source image (or even just the cross stitch pattern) to the finished product, there are several areas that lost so much detail that they don't make sense - like the shoulder, which is all green and part in shadow, so it doesn't look like it's part of the guy at all?? that i should've realised sooner would be a problem, but alas i did not. i managed to fix some of the warping a little bit - it'd warped enough that i could add extra beads to fill some of that empty space, though mostly i tried to just space them far enough apart that it wouldn't be obvious that they were spaced apart to hide a warp :'''D the warping of the paper is also the cause of the wiggly bead rows.

i have about 15 different photos taken in different lighting conditions in an attempt to get one that accurately reflected the art. in the end i still had to make adjustments in photoshop. all the little white pinpricks? glare off the beads/reflection of light. these things are proper shiny, guys.

the whole thing measures about 33x33cm and has almost completely even edges, but i cropped it a tiny bit in photoshop to hide the edges when i added the black border.

despite all of that...i'm still really, really happy with how it turned out and am absolutely floored by the response to it! i've got to admit i was nervous the mods would reject it for not being shippy enough (meaning, not being obviously H/D enough) or even too far from my recipient's wishes (i had a plan b in that event), or not traditional enough, but they didn't. :D i am so pleased that so many people seem to love it (and especially happy that my recipient does), not only because of all the work i put into it, but because it is kind of crazy, and not the sort of thing that one would expect of fanart. it's probably my craziest fanart to date.

(i have also learned a lot about this kind of art and now have a much better idea of what i need to do next time i attempt something like it.)

so! without further ado! THE COMPLETED PIECE! (click for bigger, and take a step or two back from the monitor)

heartbeats in technicolour

3AM moments

Comments

[gracerene]

I don't know that most people are aware you can respond to comment while still anon, but personally, I much prefer when authors/artists wait until reveals. 1. Sometimes responses give away the creator, even if anon, and 2. as a reader, getting a comment from the revealed author will let me know reveals have gone up (if I've missed them) and might prompt me to check out that creator's other works if I loved their submission and I'm unfamiliar with them. :D


Super cool seeing your process! I loved this piece! It was so fun and original. :)

[nerakrose]

Oh yeah, I definitely get why it's still a thing (and I think it's cute, really, like a fandom quirk), I was just curious. :)

Thanks!

[themightyflynn]

OMG, that was yours? It's absolutely gorgeous! (which I think I might have rambled at you the first comment. :/)

I knew I could comment on anon there, but I like the idea of responding in person, so to speak. :)

[nerakrose]

Yup, that was mine :D thank you!

I think I like it best too. I tried replying to comments while still anon for yuletide and I have mixed feelings about it.

[snowgall]

This is so incredibly impressive. The WORK you put into this! Just...wow. So much wow.

I love that you explained your process and gave us all these close-ups and insights into your thought processes as you went along. I found it fascinating.

I haven't done anything quite like this, but I'm a knitter, so I can sympathize with making color changes with unexpected consequences and working with grid designs that won't behave. You have my complete sympathies, though the finished product is still amazing. :)

[nerakrose]

Thanks!!

I'm a knitter too, and I think I'd rather be cursed to knit only socks for the rest of my life than have to deal with beads again :'D

(I'm joking)

[snowgall]

No kidding ♥

I meant to ask - would you be willing to post the complete finished image to tumblr so it can be reblogged? I saw the thumbnail version you reblogged from hd-erised, but would love to reblog the full image from you if you are willing to post it.

Thanks so much!

[nerakrose]

Oh, I hadn't thought of posting the whole thing to tumblr. it's up now, here :)

[snowgall]

Thank you so much! Just now reblogged :)

[epithalamium]

Omfg I forgot you sent me that snap with the close up?? :'D ahahahaha defo a close look at art that we're not really meant to see :"D

But it still looks fantastic and I applaud the amount of work and details you put into this holy shit!

[nerakrose]

i still crack up laughing when i see that snap :'''D

thank you ♥