she gives you ‘the willies’

i am so so sorry this took an additional month but here’s my piece for @pidgelikethebird for the secret fairy exchange organized by @gayalienwilde! i was working mostly with colour pencil, so unfortunately when classes started back up i could only work on this a day or two each week because it was best to do in the daylight, which is unfortunately limited at this time of year.

pidge had requested something arthur focused and/or curt x arthur, so i wanted to illustrate arthur's journey to the moment he and curt first met and the meaning that has in his story.

the lyrics on the illustration are from smalltown boy by bronski beat, which i think is one of if not The Most arthur stuart song i have ever heard. bronski beat was an openly gay synthpop group in the mid 80s, when many pop stars we now know are gay weren’t out as such. i heard about them through this trash theory video, if you’re interested in learning more about the band!

to relate to the song back to the illustration, i wanted to represent the transition arthur goes through with the mini portraits at the top - with each major instance of queer fascination with those in the same physical space as him, he literally turns around, vignette by vignette.

on a technical level, this piece allowed me to experiment in some interesting ways - i decided to do all the lineart in pink, and the text and background gradients as well as rendering the figures with coloured pencil took a lot of work to do well, and i’m proud of the results (especially with those gradients). i have a lot of progress photos, if you’re interested those are under the readmore!

i included two photos of the same piece because those pictures were taken with different cameras under different lighting conditions, and i think each brings out different qualities in the piece better. hopefully this means you can also see the metallic coloured pencils used in some areas of the piece (the silver of curt’s pants, arthur’s two glam blazers, the blue shimmer in his hair and curt’s nail, and the darker blue and purple in the text gradient).

Me: I mean depends on your tolerance for this type of racism, but like I said it's my favourite show, it def has some great parts if you're up for it.

Them: Oh so it's not racist.

Me: It absolutely is.

Them: So you're saying racism is ok??