Archive of Our Own ^beta

Notes:

Artist Notes: There's a lot artistic-wise I'd like to say about this so this note will get ranty.

First, know that this is the children's book Arthur caught Merlin doodling. Extract from the fic:
[Merlin] was tooling about with pastel chalks, creating bizarre, overlapping magical landscapes on paper.

 

"I want to write and draw my own story some day. I don't have much yet, just a vague idea. It's probably a children's book. It's about this boy," he pointed at a little bright-haired speck, lost among the menacing floral shapes in the rich green darkness. "Or maybe it's a girl, I'm not sure. They travel to this place, well, all I really know is it has these evil flowers. And it's mostly blue."

 

I really liked this children's book concept image and how it ties with the story. It was also something tangible I could do as BB podfic art to feel the text from another angle, just like the reader was feeling it through their voice. After each of my readings of the text, I had wondered: "what happened with this book idea?" sophinisba's reading hooked me on it even more. It had to be tried.

Since this was going to be only colours, first thing was the find a colour theme. Sophinisba's voice is clear and with gentle curves, so things got gentled a bit from Merlin's initial idea, and since her voice is pretty warm to me, there was almost as much reds as there were blue in the mental feel I had of this. I liked to think that Merlin found more warmth than expected in his story.

Starting from there, I researched and settled on a colour scheme based on fired copper. Types like these C-E-G-J examples felt fitting, with how fire brings out vastly different colours and fuses them randomly but harmonically without loosing any of their brightness. It has a certain bruised, happy, wondrous quality to it that this text's reading had on me.

Then I went through a scavenge hunt through the flat for pastel chalks... but only found white. I chose to cheat and fake a certain chalk effect with crayons, charcoal and oil pastels instead, with generous contributions from my flatmate's art stash, which meant choosing a smaller canva too. Then I spent a couple afternoons layering colours while listening to the podfic's draft version and others from Sophinisba (podfics are just perfect things to listen to when drawing, for me) and basically getting smudged from fingertips to elbows with a detour to nose and brow. It was gloriously fun in that childish glee I get from working coloured traditional media with no mind to stains. ^____^

I know this isn't what anyone might have expected for an illustration of this story; it's not even what *I* expected. There was a lot of moments I wanted to illustrate for this podfic, but what caught me in the end is the mood Sophinisba plunges us into. This was supposed to be part of something else, but things changed along the way; it grew into this, and I found I had nothing left to say. I can only hope others might like my take and that it shows at least some of the feelings I get from Sophinisba's beautiful interpretation.

Download as MP3 or M4B: here. Originally posted at podficbigbang. Please leave feedback to all contributors of this project. ^_^