#lyravos

@alls-fair-in-pride-and-prejudice says

DO IT DI IT DO IT

AARAVOS BLOGGER I WILL LOVE YOU FOREVER

GIB MY SLEEP DEPRIVED LOVE TO RGEM BEE SOMEONE WANTS TO DRAW MY OC????

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

(and my feelings are pretty much the same that someone wants to redraw my art????)

Is “Starlight” your name for Lyra or Loki 😭😭😭

Yes.

It is my name for those closest to my heart, those whose presence rejuvenates me and gives me strength as the light of my stars does.

~Lyra

Oh~ hello again, starlight. Decided to come back, did you?

Hm, well... Once upon a time, I would have said yes happily-- if I had not asked first. But now? After you turned my own magic back on me and left me?

I think it turned out okay!

It started as a quick stick-figure sketch, like most of my drawings do. On the left, Aaravos in the mirror, as seen by Lyra. On the right, Lyra in the mirror, as seen by Aaravos.

Then I got to work plotting it, which involved way too many careful straight lines and a ton of references to alls-fair-in-pride-and-prejudice's drawings of Lyra. Also, Google is probably confused as to why I needed a picture of Aaravos in the mirror specifically. It was quite unhelpful at first; apparently people mostly prefer to look at the star elf when he’s doing things, not when he’s just standing and looking in the mirror. 🙄

This is also when I realized I’d drawn the mirrors too small, or the people too big. I ended up deciding not to change it. Um, artistic license. Plus the bigger mirrors wouldn’t exactly fit on my paper, and I really didn’t want to re-draft the people smaller.

Finally, I could get to work on the actual people! Aaravos's hood was ridiculously hard, but not as hard as the dratted patterns! At least his cloak was pretty easy. (The hardest part was finding a good reference image. If you search ‘Aaravos hooded’ most of what you get is Aaravos decidedly not wearing his hood!)

Lyra wasn't too much easier there! Well, she was more difficult to figure out, but thankfully easier to draw once I figured out what I wanted. At one point I had her hand on the mirror, but ended up scrapping that because I can't draw foreshortening. Yet.

I also started doing the words. Since this scene goes with a few lines from Rewrite the Stars, I wanted to include those lines in the art. ....This may or may not have involved listening to Rewrite the Stars about seventy thousand times as I wrote/drew.

Aaravos tortured me here, because his starmark is RIDICULOUSLY hard to draw and I just could not get his smirk right! until I tried smirking and singing in the mirror anyway 

Lyra decided to be nice, though, so I had a great time sprinkling stars over her shirt, and adding a cute bow and a pretty golden chain in her hair. And eyelashes. Look, Aaravos is prettier than anyone else, but he doesn’t have long eyelashes. I felt bad for Lyra, a regular human dating a superhot elf, so I gave her extra thick lashes. Silly? Maybe. Fun? Yeah.

Oh, and the words! They weren't super easy to place, but they were still more cooperative than Aaravos! And I loved finding the right places and sizes to get the effect I wanted, make certain words stand out more.

And finally, coloring. I copied the sketch using my grandfather's printer (he asked to see what I was copying and I said NO (I am perfectly happy with my grandfather not knowing I drew the sparkle elf). Then I got out my pencils and immediately realized I did not know EXACTLY WHAT COLORS TO USE, what a TRAVESTY, oh my STARS (only poking fun at myself). So I prepared some swatches and sent them to alls-fair-in-pride-and-prejudice, they sent back the ones they wanted, and I got to work!

Coloring Lyra was so fun! I especially liked giving her cheeks an extra pink undertone (blushing 'cause of Aaravos, ofc!), and shading under her nose. I really like shading, even though it's super hard. And her hair! Such a gorgeous dark brown, though I didn’t get it right until I realized I could use black. *facepalm*

And then Aaravos. My gosh, it was hard to find the right combination for his skin! I still don't think it's quite right, but it's close enough. I guess. Strangely, gray under the purple and blue helped. 

His starmark didn't quite cooperate, and now he's got a second cloak, but eh. Close enough. (It felt so weird to color the 'whites' of his eyes black!) And I’m not convinced his hair looks right-- it feels like it’s either too starkly white or too lavender.

Gel pen for the little glints of light on their eyes, and for the stars and Lyra’s teeth, and I was almost done! Just the words and the mirror frames left.

Ooo, the words were fun to color! By this time my hand was hurting a bit, but whatever, who cares, I get to color the words! You may not be able to see it in the picture, but most of the words are black. The “I” and “you” in “I want you” are purple. In “you want me,” the “you” is blue, the “want” is dark red, and the “me” is purple. Down at the bottom, “hands” is purple over gold and “tied” is red over gold. Oh, and the little squiggly dash after “know”? That’s green. ;) Most of the colors relate to the rest of the color scheme, but that one was just because I wanted to put green in there.

And finished picture! Oof, this was a lot of work, but I can’t believe how ridiculously fun it was! And I’ve now got something to add to my portfolio, should I ever dare to include fanart.