Work Text:
I saw this fic in the claims gallery and just couldn't resist. This is the first time drawing early season Sam and Dean and I wanted to try out a slightly different art style than I've done before.
The scene of Dean driving across the Arizona desert on his way over to California popped into my mind immediately as a banner visual and I found an excellent reference image from an SPN episode.
The other visual that really spoke to me were the descriptions jdl71/jld71 had of both Dean and Sam longing, pining for each other, missing one another. Sweet and soft expressions on their faces. These images here were the references for that drawing and I created the background to make it look like a motel room wall and added some lighting to it all in Photoshop.
When I first did the drawings I followed the references quite closely and hid way the layers of Sam I'd already done but then realized that their skintones, due to lighting in the references are a complete mismatch. Believe my words to the author were they look like brothers from another mother. Below you can see what that version looked like. I ended up adjusting all the skin color layers for Dean to make him closer in skintone to Sam's. I also made Sam a ginger, hair-color wise, which I toned down into more brown tones.
The last piece of art was one that the author had mentioned as an artist visual, Dean holding Sam's Stanford acceptance letter. While this piece seems fairly simply just a set of hands holding a letter it took a few reference images to make it happen. The baseline for the hands was the image below of male hands holding a letter and envelope. I adapted the thumb and finger shape a bit to match Dean's. The Stanford acceptance letter is one that I found posted on Pinterest so that I could get the formatting right and came up with the content of the wording myself plus with a "fake" Singer Salvage address in Sioux Falls. I quite enjoyed the process of making this piece.
And that is it for my art set for HozierNatural, if you haven't already please hop on over to read the fic that inspired all this, right here: <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/70940046" rel="nofollow">All Roads Lead Somewhere</a>