Fanart banner: A Roswell Alien in Metropolis

It’s been a while since I shared any of my fanart here on the blog, partly because it’s been a while since I’ve done any new fanart, but I want to get some blogs done this month, and I like the first enough to share it more or less right away.

This is a story banner, a kind of ‘Movie poster’ for a crossover that I wrote last year, second in my Roswell/Smallville crossover series. I was able to get a DVD screencap of Brendan Fehr as Michael Guerin from the season 3 DVDs, in fact that’s from the series finale, since I wanted Michael to look as mature as possible, but the only Smallville DVDs I own are the season 1 box set, while this story is set in season eight.

Luckily, I was able to find some good screen captures at tvscreencaps.com, though that was different from my normal process in a lot of ways. The pictures are smaller and lower-resolution than my usual DVD captures, there aren’t as many pictures for a given scene or sequence, and because they were captured off a broadcast instead of a DVD, there’s a CW logo on the bottom of most of the images, towards the right side of the screen. So, to avoid messing up the picture, I ended up gravitating towards captures where the person I wanted to include was on the left side of the screen.

I like the way this came out, with the big high-res picture of Michael on the left of the banner, little inserts of Chloe Sullivan and Davis Bloome in the top right, and Kristen Kreuk as Lana Lang in the bottom right. And I do like that text – something that hints at the complications in the plot without spoiling them is always good.

Vidding

V is for…

I tried my hand at ‘vidding’, or fanvidding, a long time ago – it looks like the fall of 2002 through January of 2003. If you don’t know, vidding is the process of editing different clips of a TV show or movie along with other sources of video or audio to come up with your own montage or sequence, like making a ‘music video’ featuring the characters of your favorite fandom.

I’d bought some Roswell episodes in video file format on burned CDs, desperate for a better rerun fix than my old home VHS tapes, which weren’t holding up so well. The quality of the video files wasn’t astounding, but having them there did mean that I could play around with them using Windows Movie Maker, and I came up with my first two fanvids using those source files – a Max/Liz tribute to Faith Hill’s song ‘One,’ and a really angsty Michael/Maria third season montage to go with Roch Voisine’s “With these eyes.” I guess I thought of that latter connection because of the lyric at the end of the chorus, “‘Cause a sad song doesn’t care whose heart it breaks,” and Michael was always talking about how he didn’t want to hurt Maria ifhe had to leave her, but in mid Season 3 she’s the one who walks away and he’s the one who ends up shattered.

Fanart flashback #12: Coming full circle.

Fanart flashbacks index

Well, the day has come – I’m ending the fanart flashback tuesdays series here, and sharing two of the earliest fan wallpapers I ever made. These were from back in the fall of 2003, which was probably before I’d even heard of fanfic banners – though I’m not sure, because I was at Fanatics by then. Maybe I’d seen some but never really paid attention.

This first one is a fairly simple wallpaper for Smallville – almost a generic cover banner for the entire show, rather than trying to encapsulate a more specific message:

Fanart flashbacks #11: The art of arranging

Fanart flashbacks index

I know I mentioned two weeks ago that in my next Fanart flashback, I’d be wrapping the series up with some of my earliest wallpapers, but then I decided to extend it one week, and wrap up with #12. This time, I’ll share a bunch of fanfiction banners, and talk about the different ways of actually arranging different video capture elements onto the banner canvas, since I kind of glossed over that before, and I was thinking about it as I struggled over my latest banner last weekend.

There’s no one pattern of arrangement that will work for every banner; it depends on what size and shape banner you want to end up with, (which depends on where you want to show it,) and what you want to include from the video captures.

Fanart 10: Lots of small wallpapers.

Fanart series index.

Well, I think I’m going to be wrapping up this fan art series soon, though I might still share some from time to time. This week, though, I’ve got a lot of recent examples of what I call ‘wallpaper’ fanart as opposed to story banners or signature banners – fanart that’s just supposed to be pretty and possibly illustrate a moment or theme from the fandom show. I did quite a bit of that in 2010, though I’ll probably be moving back to more story banners this year.

So I’ve got six little wallpapers to show, each from a different favorite TV show. First, from Roswell, a Michael/Maria shipper banner, drawing from two early season one episodes when those characters were just starting to relate to each other:

In this case, as is usual for my wallpaper, I thought of the theme and the copy first, and then went looking for vidcaps that would suit it – from two different sequences involving Michael, Maria, and a motel room.

Fanart 9: Two Firefly Banners

Fanart series index.

I want to talk a little bit more about the ‘concept’ of fanart, since I realize that some of my readers may not have been exposed to it that much. To me, the point of fanart is using images from a television or movie to create a new picture, some kind of original vision, and convey that thought to other people who are already familiar with your fandom.

There are lots of different kinds of fanart, and I’ve only tried a few. Some people do original paintings or sketches, and some can do very elaborate manipulations using programs like photoshop and superimposing images that originally didn’t have anything to do with each other into a coherent image. I’m hoping to help with a manipulation fanart sometime soon, but I’ve been finding that even my part, finding the right pieces to put together, is much harder than I expected. Mostly, as I’ve explained, I just work with fairly simple techniques – DVD captures or promotional images, simple cut and paste graphic software, and so on.

And fanart can have lots of different messages that it’s trying to convey. There are some that are very simply calling back to a moment from the original canon, like my Simon/Kaylee wallpaper, or a few that I’ll be sharing later in the series. Some are meant to raise awareness for a particular site or event within the fandom community, a bit like virtual advertising flyers, like the signature banners from two weeks ago.

And then, there are fanfic cover banners, which are a bit like movie posters for somebody’s original fanfiction story. These are possibly my favorite, since I’ve been a very prolific fanfic author in my day, and it’s a great feeling to be able to show somebody a picture that kind of sums up thousands of the words that you’ve put down.

So, without further rambling, here’s a few banners that I made in the early summer of 2010 for two of my Firefly stories. First, “Passing through the storm:”

There’s a lot that this banner conveys to a firefly fan. First, it shows the ensemble of main characters in the story, and how they mainly relate to each other – River off by herself, Kaylee with Simon, Jayne with Zoe, Mal with Inara. To many fans, that roster will also suggest the timeframe of the story, particularly because the missing characters match with some who are no longer around after the movie ‘Serenity’. Also, most or all of the pictures are taken from the movie, not from the TV episodes.

Fanart 8: Two Ensemble/focus banners from December 2009

Fanart series index.

I did a few different story banners in December of 2009, and the first one was for another ‘concept crossover,’ Roswell Calling. This time, I took the concept of the Eliza Dushku tv series “Tru Calling”, and wished it upon a minor character from the Roswell tv series, Deputy turned Sheriff Hanson, so that he could use it to save Alex’s life. I also ended up coming with a different back-story behind Alex’s accident, since saving him from Tess on the last day of his life was something that I’d covered years before in a previous story, “Tapping Fingers.”

I actually asked if somebody at Fanatics could make a banner for this story, and wasn’t really impressed with the sample I could, but couldn’t put my finger on why. So I didn’t reply back, and left the story without a banner until I started messing around with a concept of my own, which ended up looking like this:

I’m really pleased with the way that came out, especially the shots of Alex and Hanson in the middle, and the really tiny shots running across the top and bottom of the banner.

Fanart 7: Signature banners for Support Stacie Auction

Fanart series index.

This next batch of fanart was something a little different. It started because I was involved in the ‘Support Stacie’ fandom auctions. They were an effort to raise funds for a lady who’d been very active in several fandom communities, including Roswell Fanatics, who was going through cancer treatments and struggling to pay the medical bills. The basic idea was, fanfiction authors would put themselves up on the auction block, along with general guidelines for what kinds of story they’d be willing to write – whoever placed the high bid got the opportunity to place a specific challenge or otherwise suggest elements for the story, and they’d get to choose if the finished story was posted online or for their personal pleasure. And technically, all the stories were ‘donor thank-you gifts’, I guess because there were awkward legal issues to writing fan fiction in exchange for money.

So, anyway, the people running the auction put out a call for anybody to come up with small message board signature banners that could be used to promote the auction, and I ended up making a series based on moments in the run of Roswell where the characters talked about stories:

Fanart 6: AU/Crossover banner for ‘The Wizards of Roswell.’

Fanart series index.

Moving forward again into August 2009, I wanted to spotlight a little banner I made for an unusual AU/Crossover fanfic.

Sidetrack: I often find I enjoy playing around with the raggedy edge of crossovers rather than the traditional ‘A meet B’ formula, especially taking a concept from fandom B and transplanting it to fandom A, or re-imagining the characters from fandom A entirely within fandom B. ‘Wizards of Roswell’ was an example of the latter; I took the rules and setup from Diane Duane’s excellent “Young wizards/Feline wizards” series, but not any of the familiar characters like Nita Callahan or Kit Rodriguez. Instead, Max and Isabel Evans and their friend Michael Guerin were teenage wizards in Roswell, and Max saved Liz Parker’s life with magic after she got shot. And then I introduce the vampires.

Getting back to the banner, the pictures are fairly simple. I went with screencaps from the Roswell series pilot, since the fanfic covers some of the same material and would probably fit into more or less the same time period, allowing for the differences between universes. One shot of Michael and Max reacting to the shooting seemed too good to pass up, and I included Liz in the science lab, and a more or less random shot of Katherine Heigl as Isabel, because she’s also an important character. Maria and Alex didn’t make the cut this time.

Fanart 5: Max/Liz banners for ‘Not Written Yet’ and ‘Las Cruces Rendezvous…’

Fanart series index.

I thought I’d spotlight two different fanfiction banners for this week – I did them both during July of 2009, and they’re both centering on ‘Dreamer’ pairing stories. First, ‘Not Written Yet’, which I wrote and finished many years ago, in the winter and spring of 2005, an alternate version of the episode ‘End of the world.’