MASTER OF THE HIDDEN SALAMI 🔞

And here’s the process video for the second cover I did for @themauvesoul’s series.

Same caveats apply as usual eg flashing layers, no sound, sometimes looks like I’m doin nothing bc I’m shading individual diamonds in a fuckass championship ring etc.

Also this has a little bit of the same footage as the other one bc I started them on the same canvas before splitting them.

Process video from my first cover for @themauvesoul’s series.

This is a direct export of what procreate automatically generates as your working and I didn’t do editing except to speed it up so it’d fit on tumblr so:

There’s a lot of flashing lights as I toggle the same layers fifty times in a row

Sometimes it looks like nothing is happening bc I’m working on something super zoomed in and the video is lower resolution than I worked at

Surprise! The covers I did for the first and third fics in @themauvesoul's "two weddings and a scandal" series are a diptych 💖 so here they are together without the fic details so you can see them side by side.

Also see some details, without some of the level and image adjustment I did at the very end. I used a SketchUp model someone did of Madison square garden to do the bg of the cover for and we all fall down.

Definitely click in to view the high res if you want to appreciate like. The individual diamonds in the hideous Stanley cup rings, or make out the exact model of Shane’s Rolex, idk.

and we all fall down by lowkey existential despair (@themauvesoul)

Rated E

The truth was, yeah, Shane married Ilya, but he’d married hockey first. He married hockey the second he signed his rookie contract with the Metros, and his courtship began long, long before. And his marriage to hockey wasn’t like his marriage to Ilya. Hockey wouldn’t ever love him back. Ilya wasn’t going to chew Shane up and spit him out at some nebulous point after he turned thirty and before he turned forty, his joints busted and his mouth full of dentures and his brain fucked to hell and back. And that marriage—his first marriage—had always come before his second, illicit shotgun wedding.

It wasn’t ideal, maybe, but that was just how things were. Hell, it was probably the same for Ilya, too. The fuck was Shane supposed to do about it? Nothing, nothing, nothing. He liked his life just the way it was. He didn’t want to do anything different. He still doesn’t. And that’s the worst, most shameful part of it all: at the end of the day, some part of Shane will always wish he could wind back time like adjusting a watch; erase that Instagram post before it ever hit the internet and go back to the life they’d had before; the life that was slowly killing them both.

So I can't post 13/15 of the actual images I painted for the latest chapter of @luulapants "The Tennis Club" for um. Obvious reasons I guess. But here they are censored, along with the two I can :)

Holy Matrimony by lowkey existential despair (@themauvesoul)

Rated E

There’s a sign in front of Shane. It says Welcome to Scott Hunter and Kip Grady’s Happily Ever After in a cursive font that makes Shane think of Etsy. Shane’s stomach churns. He briefly squeezes his empty ring finger. He feels, all at once, like he might cry. Instead, he swallows, and breathes, and pastes a smile on his face, and marches his ass down to Scott and Kip’s fucking wedding of the century.

I didn't like any of the designs I'd seen for the Ottawa centaurs so far, and I needed it for a background detail, so I said fuck it and made my own.

For chapter 4 of @luulapants fic, “my mom sold me to Scott Hunter” - up now on Ao3!!

Sure, thanks :)

I usually do my limited palette stuff from reference, and I like working from tumblr gifs, so my step one is usually find reference.

Step two is pick a palette - I like using challenge palettes for this, and then sometimes I will take requests, other times I will randomly generate a number. I really like this set.

Step three is go for it. I usually try to keep my palette studies to under an hour. If you’re going for likeness, shape is going to be important, so don’t be afraid to drag your reference over to double check your shapes.

General tips, tricks, details:

I use procreate to draw on my iPad. I mostly use two default brushes, the HB pencil and the eaglehawk. I also use a big default watercolor brush, and a couple paid brush sets by manero if I’m in the mood (love his gouache and thick oil packs). I just like brushes with a lot of texture!

Working with a limited palette it’s also important to keep track of value. I have the side button on my iPad mapped so that if I triple click it triggers an accessibility setting to change everything to greyscale.

Then it’s also important to keep track of warmth etc so your colors don’t get too muddy. I usually take a screenshot of the color palette I’m working with and pick right from there, and sometimes from on the canvas after I’ve mixed them, to keep me honest if I’m doing a challenge. If I’m not doing an actual challenge I might add a little bit deeper colors to develop more contrast, especially if I decide to keep going past an hour.

If you’re looking to develop your color sense:

An art school exercise that I did back in the day was to make a big mess of lines and then paint in each shape with a different color that had the same value. (We’d check on our phones). This was done in irl oils so it was a real pain in the ass lol.

If you’re into the color theory of it all, it might be a fun exercise to try doing analogous color schemes, dyadic, triadic, etc. these are all based on the color wheel. Google would probably be a better resource than me on those, though, because I’m gonna go straight from memory onto the page.

Some details from my cover for @luulapants fic The Tennis Club (which is not about tennis lol)

The Tennis Club

By Luulapants @luulapants

Rated E

"I don't mean to come here and freak you out," Scott said, though he knew there was no avoiding it. He'd been where they were before. It had felt like he was dying, back then. "I just don't want you to think you're the only ones, okay? There's lots of us."

Their eyes snapped to him in unison, startled and intense. Hollander croaked, "What?"

"There's over sixteen hundred guys in the MLH and AHL," he reminded them, because it had felt improbable to him when he first heard until he remembered the sheer size of the hockey world. "There's — well, we don't know how many of us there are, but there's at least seventeen of us that know each other. Plus you two. We watch out for each other."

His eyes enormous, Hollander asked, "There's, what? A secret underground gay hockey network?"

Scott shrugged. "Yeah, basically."

I made a cover and did css/html for @luulapants forrrr....

my momsold me to Scott Hunter, a Shane Hollander fanfiction

by luulapants

rpfactorfiction

Oh my god, I didn't know there were any copies of this left on the internet. For those who don't know, this is like. This is a foundational text of hockey RPF. This is from before hockey RPF was really a thing even. It's from the mid-aughts and wasn't posted to a fanfiction website. Instead, OP dropped this insane RPF manifesto onto a normal ass hockey fan forum (which no longer exists) then deleted their account like two days later. Just handed this to a bunch of jocks and hockey bros and dipped. Legendary shit. Like, I don't think this kid even knew what fanfiction was, the fucking hand of god just compelled him to write about being an MLH player's sex slave and show it to the world. I pray every day that this insane child actually made it to the MLH and got to meet Scott Hunter.