Bloody hellfire. I'm stumped for words. I'm looking at this picture and thinking I don't know how you did it. I just don't know what to say.
THANK YOU!!
I can't believe I've been lucky enough to have inspired these two startling pieces of art from you, and in such a short time frame too. The thrill of seeing fanart of your work is something that happens rarely, but I'm still floating on a cloud of excitement from the last pic, and now I'm not sure my feet will touch the ground for weeks. I'm terribly proud to be associated with you! My ego is about the size of my house right now :D
I think what you've done is you've painted my Harry. My friend Fray says that Lillithium paints the Draco she sees in her head, and I think what you've done is the same for me; I look at this picture and it's the Harry I see in my mind.
In terms of picking out elements of the picture, I can't begin to - it's all done so brilliantly that everything impacts on everything else. I love the skin tone you've used, and the way he looks ill. I think the white highlighting along his limbs is more than light; in it I can see the sheen of sweat, and he just looks like he's had a near-death experience. He looks bewildered and in pain. Like everyone else says, the bruises are incredible. I can't remember seeing bruises in fanart before, but these ones - you can just reach out and touch them. They look so fresh and bloody, like raw steak, and that's pretty much the image I had in my mind when I was thinking about those men pulverising him. Making him like meat, sub-human. Just holes to fuck without tenderness or regard. The whole scene was meant to be dehumanising, and I think the feeling of your picture captures the after effects of that perfectly.
When I'm clicking back up to the pic to stare at it again, I keep being drawn to his eyes and lips, and his ribcage. They are so beautifully rendered that they seem real. I love the black shininess of the skin around his eyes, and how sunken and tired they look. I love the twist of his mouth and the way he seems to be grimacing inside, without acting it out.
I LOVED Draco, but I think I love this more. People just don't tend to pick the messed up things to paint - they pick the pretty, undamaged things, or they show the beauty in single dimension. But this, as in the painting Lillithium did of Draco in Spare the Rod, this focuses on the reality, of the brokenness and remaking of the person inside the skin, and I think that's why I feel very close to this art indeed. It feels like a part of me, even though it's a part of you.
It's been a very long time since I read any of the trilogy fics. I have a tendency not to read my own stuff once it's posted because I can't leave it alone, and I've promised on pain of death not to correct or rework the poorer sections of these fics for fear of taking something of the atmosphere away. I admit I cringed when I read that section above! I do avoid my work like the plague :D
When I was writing this final story, the central theme of the early part is Harry's realisation that there's no victory in death. He hasn't bothered to try living for a long time, and it's only the reality of his imminent death that jolts him to think that he can't stop now. The rest of the story, as with Glove Puppet, was trying to show how two damaged people could fix someone else without necessarily having the tools to make their own life better. Writing it from Harry's pov always meant that I understood his motivations better than Draco's, and in some ways that was my nod to canon, in which we have Draco and his intentions shrouded in a certain kind of mystery, because he's not the character we're intimate with. But it was also important all the way through to have the broken narrator be Harry and not Draco, because I wanted to deconstruct canon Harry and remake him as the person I felt he should have become after a childhood of abuse, lovelessness, and being manipulated.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2009-08-01 12:48 pm (UTC)THANK YOU!!
I can't believe I've been lucky enough to have inspired these two startling pieces of art from you, and in such a short time frame too. The thrill of seeing fanart of your work is something that happens rarely, but I'm still floating on a cloud of excitement from the last pic, and now I'm not sure my feet will touch the ground for weeks. I'm terribly proud to be associated with you! My ego is about the size of my house right now :D
I think what you've done is you've painted my Harry. My friend Fray says that Lillithium paints the Draco she sees in her head, and I think what you've done is the same for me; I look at this picture and it's the Harry I see in my mind.
In terms of picking out elements of the picture, I can't begin to - it's all done so brilliantly that everything impacts on everything else. I love the skin tone you've used, and the way he looks ill. I think the white highlighting along his limbs is more than light; in it I can see the sheen of sweat, and he just looks like he's had a near-death experience. He looks bewildered and in pain. Like everyone else says, the bruises are incredible. I can't remember seeing bruises in fanart before, but these ones - you can just reach out and touch them. They look so fresh and bloody, like raw steak, and that's pretty much the image I had in my mind when I was thinking about those men pulverising him. Making him like meat, sub-human. Just holes to fuck without tenderness or regard. The whole scene was meant to be dehumanising, and I think the feeling of your picture captures the after effects of that perfectly.
When I'm clicking back up to the pic to stare at it again, I keep being drawn to his eyes and lips, and his ribcage. They are so beautifully rendered that they seem real. I love the black shininess of the skin around his eyes, and how sunken and tired they look. I love the twist of his mouth and the way he seems to be grimacing inside, without acting it out.
I LOVED Draco, but I think I love this more. People just don't tend to pick the messed up things to paint - they pick the pretty, undamaged things, or they show the beauty in single dimension. But this, as in the painting Lillithium did of Draco in Spare the Rod, this focuses on the reality, of the brokenness and remaking of the person inside the skin, and I think that's why I feel very close to this art indeed. It feels like a part of me, even though it's a part of you.
It's been a very long time since I read any of the trilogy fics. I have a tendency not to read my own stuff once it's posted because I can't leave it alone, and I've promised on pain of death not to correct or rework the poorer sections of these fics for fear of taking something of the atmosphere away. I admit I cringed when I read that section above! I do avoid my work like the plague :D
When I was writing this final story, the central theme of the early part is Harry's realisation that there's no victory in death. He hasn't bothered to try living for a long time, and it's only the reality of his imminent death that jolts him to think that he can't stop now. The rest of the story, as with Glove Puppet, was trying to show how two damaged people could fix someone else without necessarily having the tools to make their own life better. Writing it from Harry's pov always meant that I understood his motivations better than Draco's, and in some ways that was my nod to canon, in which we have Draco and his intentions shrouded in a certain kind of mystery, because he's not the character we're intimate with. But it was also important all the way through to have the broken narrator be Harry and not Draco, because I wanted to deconstruct canon Harry and remake him as the person I felt he should have become after a childhood of abuse, lovelessness, and being manipulated.