oluka-art

Some spoilers for the fic’s general plot and themes ahead!

I joined the team a bit later than the other artist for the fic, and they had already drafted a beautiful and moody art of Clark looking out on lake Como. I felt like it would be a nice parallel to have an art of Bruce alone as kind of a mirror image. When reading through the fic and associated notes, I saw that there was a moment where Bruce researches what the hell is going on with Clark. I knew I had found my scene. I decided to put Bruce in the batcave with many many screens in front of him: because I would be able to kind of tell a story with the screens, and because it looks super cool.

Here’s what my first sketch looked like! As you can see, I stayed pretty close to it.

I also decided to try something I’ve never done before, namely drawing in b&w first and then adding colors. This made it possible for me to have dramatic shading and harsh lighting right from the start.

My style for this art is semi-realistic. I mainly used the default gouache brushes of CSP to get a painterly feel with nice textures. I also added some “dust in the light” effects and screen textures because, once again, it looks cool. Many things are only part of this art because they look cool. Here are a few zoom-ins:

The thirteen (!!!!!) screens all have different things on them, but all are related to Clark somehow. They show:

1. his vitals; 2. a scan of his body;

3. a medical report that Bruce is writing about him;

4. a chemical breakdown of the flower petals that he’s coughing up; 5. a picture of said flowers in Clark’s kitchen sink;

The molecules in the chemical breakdown are all molecules that in real life supposedly are the reason for the way roses smell. The last one is one I invented. Hopefully it’s a molecule that can’t exist on Earth, so that we’re all very sure it’s a kryptonian molecule.

6. an unspecified pie chart because SCIENCE; 7. a downloading screen (Bruce is downloading information from the Fortress of Solitude);

8. a picture of the bat-shaped scar that has appeared on Clark’s chest as part of the illness (in the shape of Bruce’s batarangs);

(appreciate the glory that is Cavill's Superman's hairy pec)

9. an X-ray version of the scar pic (this was mostly because I ran out of ideas on what to draw) because SCIENCE again; 10. a news headline wondering about Superman’s whereabouts (since Clark is ill);

11. a page of kryptonian text; 12. the sun path diagram for Como. Bruce is looking at places to forcibly bring Clark to heal to :)

The text in kryptonian actually has a meaning! This art was the occasion for me to learn that there are several different kryptonian alphabets and languages: the comics have one or two, the Snyder movies have one, and the Gunn Superman movie has yet another. Since this fic is based on the Snyder movies, I went with that language. Did you know they hired a linguist to actually develop it from scratch, grammar, pronunciation and all? Here’s a cool website if you’re interested. But also: did you know it is a PAIN to write????? It looks so pretty but my god. My god. I decided to be somewhat reasonable and not try to invent kryptonian words. So the text is actually english letters and syllables written with kryptonian glyphs. Here’s the transcription:

hanahaki disease of the soulmate unbonded

and, finally, 13. a big zoom in of Clark’s face, because Bruce is a pining fool <3

The one single thing I spent the most time on was definitely Clark’s face. First of all, Henry Cavill has a weird face, okay? Way too angular. What are those cheekbones doing. How can you have full but also angular and flat lips. What’s the deal. So I struggled. I pretty much copied a still from MoS:

And still the likeness could be better!! But I do think it looks like him, so mission accomplished. Have a few progress shots of me struggling.

Hours later....

the final face!! His mouth could still be better, but I'm happy with how his eyes, nose and eyebrows turned out.

The second thing I spent the most time on was probably Bruce’s cape. I actually love drawing his cape, because I can add as many dramatic folds as I want, and since everything is black anyways it’s a bit more forgiving for errors. So I just do whatever until it looks cool. For the cape here I wanted it to have a good weight to it but still not fall straight down. I cheated a bit because the connection between cowl and cape doesn’t really look like that on the BvS batsuit, but I find the actual one boring. I made the draping a little more dramatic.

As you might have seen, drawing black on black actually means drawing a lot of colors BUT black. I was mostly in the greys for Batman, but I did add some true black in the darkest shadows. I like how it turned out.

Here’s what the final piece looks like in b&w.

I tried adding colors, but I couldn’t make it work at all. It just looked like those badly colorized black and white photographs. Example below.

So I decided to go with a subtle blue tint (which pairs well with the idea that Bruce is a loser standing in the dark in front of his thousand computer screens), with red highlights where I felt appropriate. One of them being the blood that Clark coughs out, of course <3 I think it looks good, even though it’s maybe a little bit corny. But, you know. This is fanart for a fanfic for a comic book movie, so I think we’re allowed to be a little heavy-handed and overly dramatic.

Anyways, look how good the cape turned out. Mostly blues, but for a few reds to enhance the contrast a little. And make it more dramatic. Hell yeah!!