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.

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.

Time to break out of the word count slump.

I haven’t written many new words since Nanowrimo ended. For a while there, I didn’t feel like I really could – writing seventy thousand words in thirty days is a bit draining on that creative faculty, so I needed time to recharge, and I’ve been working on other facets of my writing like critiquing other people’s stuff and proofreading.

But I put down 16,000 words as my December total on Stringing Words, and my grand total so far is fifteen hundred and fifteen – from the two Star Patrol blogisodes I’ve already posted. Nine and a half percent of my target, with fifty three percent of the month gone. Time to get moving a bit.

Hopefully, it shouldn’t be that hard to get the words to start flowing. 14.5k in two weeks isn’t that much for a Nano-er, after all. I picked the word count goal based on how much I’d figure to do four blogisodes, and write chapter updates for two of my Roswell crossovers.

So time to stop blogging and actually WRITE, if you know what I mean!