#019
MAY 18, 2022

guess who went crazy this week and fully revamped the graphics of not one, but two of their fics? american animals and witch burning got a cute little makeover this week, and though anxiety was the reason i redid the stories, i am somewhat proud of how the new graphics turned out. so. Let's Examine.

i made new moodboards for the entire cast of american animals, but let's begin with the main character, the man(tis), the myth, the legend... spencer sato! i'm very proud of these moodboards. i feel this colouring suits the vibes of the story better; it's also easier to look at than the previous one, which was very peach-y and often washed out the images it was put over.

as far as symbolism in these moodboards go, i think it's pretty on-the-nose. the main point of interest to me is the second moodboard, in which i included a gif. i don't know, i just thought it was cool. it was too much effort to do for the rest of the characters though JAFHSJ so spencer was the only one who got this special treatment.

gwen stacy is next. with spencer's boards i leaned into the deeper pink-red but with gwen i stuck to lighter colours and images. in aa gwen is very much the light-coded side of the spider-woman/mantis partnership, while spencer is by default the dark. gwen's boards also feel less violent to me. i don't know if that's a quantifiable quality but here we are.

harry osborn's are pretty self-explanatory too. he's hot, he's rich, he's the green goblin. aa is based heavily around colour themes (both graphic-wise and symbol-wise) and volumes one and three feature green most prominently. you can see it everywhere; in spencer (mantis = green), peter (lizard = green) and harry (money/foreshadowing for his green goblic arc = green). harry is the most consistent source of "green" throughout this story and so his moodboards reflect that.

despite peter parker also representing the colour green, i chose to focus on red for his moodboards to make a mental note for myself of what he could've been. in this universe he was never spider-man; instead, he becomes one of spider-man's most well-known foes, the lizard. still, red is such a spider-man colour that i had to use it for peter. you'll notice he still has a few hints of green here and there, to symbolise his fate, but for the most part these shades of green are lighter (read: weaker) than harry's.

last but not least for this section, the new cover! which is just a glitched-out version of the old one with the new psd colouring applied. the glitching kind of implies that some itsv-type universe-hopping will happen in american animals but that is not the case. i just thought it looked cool.

🗝️

similarly to american animals, i went crazy and redid the graphics for witch burning. this was a less-gruelling task because the cast of wb is much smaller than aa, something that in retrospect i am definitely grateful for. again, the symbolism in lark's boards is relatively obvious. i included snow/ice skating imagery because she's a skater; text quotes that are relevant to her character; houses because it's a house (wally's childhood home) that her "larkvision" alternate reality is based upon. the shooting star image in the first board is a cute little nod to the wb time travelling au aka berenstein, which is partially inspired by howl's moving castle. hmc is also lark's favourite movie in that universe, though i'm yet to decide if it's the same in wb's.

every day i have to wake up and shoulder the burden of knowing my favourite dc character is wally west, a redhead and self-proclaimed "midwestern conservative". 😐😐 my love for wally west is clearly one-sided because making moodboards for him is extremely difficult and if he loved me back he'd make it easier. (seriously. these are practically identical to my berenstein ones because i've had to reuse pictures.) to compensate for the lack of wally west pins i have, i added a bunch of images relevant to his relationship with lark.

the deep red you can see throughout wb's graphics is representative of lark's "magic" (more accurately, abilities, but whatever) and her love. it's obviously present in her moodboards but it invades wally's too.

and here's the new wb cover to go with these graphics. i'll be honest, i personally think it's not as good or interesting as it could be, but until i come up with something better this is what we are settling for. It Gets the Job Done.

(reading back over what i've written for this update i'm laughing a bit to myself because i am such an overthinker it's embarrassing at this point. like damn these are literally moodboards 😭😭 no need to write a thesis on them!!)