This Must Have Taken Literally Forever To Finish - Blog Posts

finalgirlart

8 months ago

A calligraphy piece of the title poem from the podcast The Silt Verses, written in black ink, apart from the first and last lines which are in gold, along with (in the former's case) an illuminated first letter showing an old-fashioned radio on a car dashboard. The poem is decorated with an elaborate watercolour border, which shows:
- Portraits of Carpenter, Shrue, Paige, Faulkner, Val and Hayward, marked 'The Anathema', 'The Martyr', 'The Widow', 'The Prophet', 'The Saint' and 'The Rootkeeper'.
- Small interstitial illustrations including a snare-dog, a crab-saint, a grinning creature of many faces and a cuckoo clock resembling the Amicus Motel.
- The four individual sigils of the Many Below's mark, one in each corner, each shown in a different way.
- A landscape illustration on the top left and bottom right, one showing Carpenter standing atop a burning cabin, the other showing her wading out into a river, cradling Faulkner's corpse.
- An object illustration on the bottom left and top right, one showing two rifles, one blood-spattered and both wrapped with a red ribbon, and one showing two fishhooks, an axe and a shard of mirror, both bloodstained.
- In the centre, two boats. One is made of warped and twisted human flesh, and trails a net in which a lobster and remora are shown tangled. One is a small dinghy, containing Hayward and an unconscious Paige, sailing through the tangled branches of the Many Below, which above spear a hare and an owl.
- Central to the illustration, two vertical hands reaching for each other through foam and bubbles. One is Carpenter's, one Faulkner's. A banner curled around them reads 'MARCO!' 'POLO!'

These were the Silt Verses.

(closeups/design notes/rambling under the cut, because it took me over a month to make this so I'm going to be a little self-indulgent.)

spoilers for the whole podcast ahead!

Our protagonists! Notes:

Some of these came out more accurate to how I see them than others. Hayward in particular looks much less grimy and haggard than I imagine him. Carpenter, on the other hand, is perfect in my eyes. Shrue is (subconsciously) very much inspired by the wonderful @unbloodiedmartyr's rendition of them (thanks Sacha, your art goes insanely hard!)

Hayward and Paige face away, a nod to their final parting. Carpenter and Faulkner face one another, in deference to their final reunion.

Val and Shrue are both shown at the moment of their deaths.

Paige, the only character confirmed to survive the immediate finale, is the only one with closed eyes.

I'm a blond Faulkner truther. Sorry.

Someone left some really really insane tags on a Valpost I made like a month ago about how Val can alter her appearance as she pleases, but the Last Word can never convince her not to see the actual aftermath of her torture when she looks in the mirror, and it sent me a little crazy, so I was trying to capture that failing self-deceit here. She's meant to look absurdly young, but where the flames overlay her face, you can see the prayer marks and lacerations on her skin.

I had this out on my desk for days and every time a family member dropped by I had to frantically hide the fact I was drawing 'politician gets shot in the head' fanart. RIP.

A series of apparently innocuous objects: a symbol drawn in sand, another scrawled on a bright postcard, elaborately furling ribbon, and a broken stick.

These are the marks of the Many Below! They look Not Great enlarged, but hey ho. I wanted them to look hidden and incidental, separated in each corner as they are:

'Begin with a balbis on its side. Within the two spaces, a circle marked by a single dot.' Drawn in the silt of the White Gull River.

'Beneath this, a pair of concentric circles. Within the annulus, an ovoid with a slit - a staring eye.' Scrawled across the pug postcard Cross uses to write his idea to scapegoat Shrue.

'Under that, a lemniscate over a heptagram[...]' Made up of the ribbon that binds Mercer and Gage's rifles.

'[...]and three parallel lines beneath.' Faulkner's staff, broken into three pieces.

A cuckoo clock in the shape of a motel; a sign above reads 'Amicus'. Two cuckoos face each other on either side, and below hang the limp bodies of two men, suspended in ligatures. Above are two roses; beneath, two torn-up seedlings.

Interstitial illustrations. There are four sets of these, which (roughly) correspond to more stand-alone episodes & fan favourites. This is my favourite, for my beloved Chapter 36: All Lovers Part As Dust. I had a blast distilling recurring motifs of the episode into one little illustration, and I'm really proud of the result; I think it captures the match of sweet and bitter that the episode in question inspires. The clock points to the eleventh hour.

Two illustrations of boats. On the left, a sleeping woman and a rowing man, Paige and Hayward, sail a dinghy down a stylised river. Branches grow up around them, above spearing a hare and a barn owl. On the right, a boat made of distorted skin and flesh casts nets into dark water, catching a lobster and a remora.

These are pretty self-explanatory: I couldn't pass up a chance to draw the inciting miracle of the series, and it made sense to pair it with the image of Paige and Hayward sailing downriver at the end of Season 2, an image which has always haunted me.

The hare and the owl are from Chapter 26, a symbol of the Wound Tree's emergence. The lobster and fish are intended as a nod to Faulkner and Rane, a character who I love but couldn't include more overtly. Lobsters are seen as a symbol of devotion and fidelity because, apocryphally, they mate for life, and yet the lobster here is without its pair. The fish was intended to be a remora, which swims beside sharks. (Yes, I'm aware remora are tropical sea-dwelling fish, and humbly beg any marine biologists reading this not to kill me on the spot).

Two border illustrations. The top shows two rifles, one spattered with blood, shown wrapped with a red ribbon. The bottom shows a piece of broken glass and an axe, both smeared with blood, and on either side, a fishhook.

The Killing And Violence Siblings!

These object illustrations were deliberately positioned as parallels and specifically reference Season 2, marking the point of the poem that is made up of that series' titles (an attention to the series chronology that roughly coheres throughout the piece. Very roughly.)

Mercer and Gage's rifles are twisted round with a red ribbon, which bleeds into the White Gull, binding them together and reflecting how they're rarely seen apart. The ribbon's also a deliberate parallel to the banner wrapping Carpenter and Faulkner's hands elsewhere in the art.

Carpenter's axe and Faulkner's sororicidal mirror shard are depicted alongside fish hooks, as though they're separated for much of the season, the Parish draws them back together in the end. Also an echo of Paige's line, 'Love is just a meat hook for you to catch me on.'

There's only blood on one of the rifles, in a nod to Mercer and Gage's uneven dynamic.

Two landscape illustrations. The first shows a silhouetted figure standing atop of a cabin in flames, holding something aloft. The cabin is surrounded by trees, and loose pages swirl either side of it. The second shows a river landscape where two oak trees and a willow grow. A woman, Carpenter, cradles Faulkner's white-clad body in the currents.

Bookend landscapes. The pages were intended to reference the Silt Verses as an in-story document, and represent the themes of truth, myth and record throughout.

A close up of the gold gothic letter 'L' that opens the manuscript; it is superimposed over an old-fashioned radio and stylised music notes, which is perched atop a car dashboard beyond which we can see a clear blue sky.

The illumination!

It was always going to be a radio-- not a nod specifically to Sid Wright, but really to the use of broadcast, music and sound throughout the show. TSV's sound design is truly one of the things I admire most about it.

The radio is meant to be on Carpenter and Faulkner's dashboard, as they drive along the river in the very first episode, hence its positioning at the start of the poem.

Two hands-- the upper clearly Carpenter's, the lower clearly Faulkner's-- reaching for each other through foam and current. A banner wraps around them, reading 'MARCO!' 'POLO!' in gold lettering.

I conceived this as the centre of the piece, and drew the rest around it.

aaaand that was a lot. I didn't cover everything, and I recommend clicking on the final piece to get full quality and see how the details interact with one another-- but if you've read through all these meanderings, thank you, sibling. I started this two weeks after the finale, and managed a full relisten while drawing. It's been a labour of love, and I now hate watercolours more than I have words for.