vintage-greenhornmod:

A late birthday present for MerriAuthor.

I absolutely love the well-written and entertaining short stories MerriAuthor is currently doing on her blog. I really admire how well thought out her responses and head canons often are, especially her thoughts on storytelling, since, as of late, I’ve been trying to improve my storytelling.

Anathema was the first of her short stories that I’ve read and I thoroughly enjoy every one afterward. I was heavily inspired by 20th century Japanese postcards at the time and I wanted to give a go at it.

Finding the composition this image for it was a bit tricky. At first I was imaging a frontal shot of China Saucer, but then she’d be looking at the audience with a crazed stare. That composition could also lead to near symmetry, and I also wanted to avoid that. A three quarters perspective from the cow’s side could have made it difficult to identify more than one cow. I decided for a frontal shot of the cows instead, with China Saucer in a sort of side view in front of them. It still didn’t look right to me, so I just made the cows talking heads above China Saucer.

There was still some awkward empty space, and I tried filling them with text at first, but it was more distracting than it was before. Adding speech bubbles was a good idea, not only because it can fill up the space, but because I could also use it to obscure China Saucer’s notepad.

I limited the color palette to bring the elements together, but after I was done, when I looked at it on my other monitors, overall, the images was way too light. Apparently, the monitor I mainly work on shows the colors darker then they actually are, something I will definitely keep in mind for future works.

Ah! That’s so nice of you! I love the aesthetic, plus it’s great to see some fan art for China too. Thank you so much!

For anyone interested, the short story in question cane be found here.