“Malfoy,” Harry said, squinting with a new suspicion. “Are you… drunk?”
“Not yet.” Malfoy shook the flask. “How about it, Potter?”
The third entry in my Harry Potter series, Spring Forward, Fall Back, this Hogwarts era story takes place a month after the The Bubo.
OR, read on for some excerpts and a making-of story. Tl;dr: it took me 6 fucking months to make that illustration.
The Yule Ball. Harry hated everything about it. But above all, he hated the sight of Draco Malfoy having the time of his life.
I wrote this story in March and April, and after considerable polishing, posted it late in May. As usual, it was only then that it occurred to me that 1) I’ll want to advertise it on Tumblr and Reddit; 2) I’ll need some kind of a visual for it, preferably an illustration of something from the fic itself; and that, 3) being a budding artist, I might make such an illustration myself.
Something stabbed him between the eyebrows, a blur of white and the burn of a cut. “Ow,” he protested, rubbing his forehead. Between his feet lay a paper crane, twitching in its death throes, long neck broken by the impact. Harry unfolded the note. “Start walking,” it said. “I’ll show you the way.”
I got to work, and arrived relatively quickly at a sketch I liked:
In a historic chat with my dear friend, @mallstars, I said that “i’m not gonna do a detailed background, just dark with moonlight streaking, and the title etc will be in the empty space on the right.”
Two weeks later… “i said i wouldn’t do a detailed background, but i ended up twisting [a friend’s] arm till he made me a 3d model of the room so i could draw it correctly in perspective, with the moonlight and all that shit.”
“It’ll take me MONTHS,” I concluded.
I thought I was joking. 😅
“Hot!” the note announced, growing warmer still and turning a full, glowing red when he peered into the first classroom. Empty. The second classroom was where Professor McGonagall had held the dancing lessons. Its door was ajar. Harry’s heart began to pound as he pushed it open.
The model was built in Wings3D, and then I imported it to Blender to render the lights. The chairs are some open-source model I found on the web. I fiddled with the camera for days till I found a good angle. Then I took a screenshot, put it behind my sketch in Clip Studio Pain, and despaired. How the fuck was I supposed to make that ungodly combination of super-accurate geometry and my fat-lined, undetailed figures look good???
“What are you playing at, Malfoy?” Malfoy’s teeth flashed. “Come closer and find out.” Obviously, obviously, it was some kind of trap.
The one thing I knew how to do was the night sky with the moon and the stars. Unfortunately, that only makes about 10% of the image. I had no clue what to do with the floor, with the walls, with the fireplace – why on earth did I want a fucking fireplace to begin with?
“You made me come all the way up here to—” What, exactly? Harry cocked his head to the side, squinting at Malfoy with a new suspicion. “Malfoy,” he said. “Are you… drunk?” “Not yet.” Malfoy shook the flask again. “How about it, Potter?” Harry laughed. “You want me to drink that? With you?”
I toyed with the idea of actually texturing the model. Thankfully, I realized that would only exacerbate my trouble: if the textured model ended up looking even half-decent, that would make the figures stand out all the more.
Instead, I did the next worst thing: I textured the background itself. I found royalty-free images of stone and brick walls and floors, and rotated & stretched them into correct perspective. Like so:
This still looked way too good compared to anything I could do by hand. So I did it by hand: I went on and traced all the lines of the textures with the same fat pencil brush I used for the Drarry sketch.
“Don’t be crass, Potter. It’s not about the booze. It’s about having a good time.” “Right. Because that’s totally our thing.” “We had our moments.” Malfoy was unscrewing the flask. “The first day of school. The greenhouse. The lakeshore.” “Er. First day of school, Moody turned you into a ferret because you were about to hex me behind my back. We ended up in the greenhouse because you made me drop an armful of Snape’s glassware. And at the lake, you threw my glasses in the water. If that’s your idea of a good time, I’d better be going.” But he didn’t go anywhere.
As a means of further procrastination from the deeply intimidating task of trying to render the figures too, I decided that the wall by the fireplace was too empty and needed a portrait. This part, I’m happy to report, I did all on my own. Ending up with:
Which is where I was about 3 months ago.
Malfoy lifted an arm straight up and spun under it in circles, as if holding onto an invisible rope. His head lolled back, far enough for his hair to spill from his forehead like a sheet of rain, and for his pale neck to stretch in a long curve. Harry didn’t know where to look. Every part of Malfoy’s body was in motion. And there was something… unsettling about it. Something indecent, something adult, something Harry wasn’t ready for.
I will not divulge the gory details of the rest of my journey; suffice it to say, no further models or textures were abused in the making of Drarry. I showed the penultimate version to three artist friends: @anjian, @faiell and @sixtus66, asking for critique. To my delight, each of them made different, but complementary, suggestions. To my despair, all of them were aimed at issues I was already aware of but hoped to get away with. I ended up doing about 70% of what was advised, but that raised the quality of the end result immeasurably. I could not be more grateful. 🥹
And so the journey ends, and I can advertise this half-a-year-old fic on here at long fucking last.
Malfoy was looking at him expectantly, with an arm squared over a canted hip. “Come on.” “Er… what?” Malfoy beckoned. Harry stared for another second, then burst out laughing. “You can’t be serious.” Malfoy’s teeth looked sharp behind his arsehole smirk. “Chicken.”
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