looking for a piece of HP fanart...

[ratcreature]

At least I'm fairly sure that I didn't just imagine its existence. It was drawings of HP magical creatures, but done in a style of an old bestiary, i.e. the art was faking to be excerpts from an old book about magical creatures from the HP universe. The art looked like old vintage prints and there might have been bits of text too, though I'm not sure about that. At first I suspected it might have been one of gnatkip's pieces, but I haven't found it there, so that doesn't seem to be the case.

Does anyone know which fanart I'm taking about? For all I know there could be several with this premise, as it seems a really obvious thing to do, and in that case I'd like to see any variations on this theme too, but mainly I want to look at the cool fake-bestiary again that I seem to remember... And if I somehow hallucinated this and it doesn't exist, why on earth not?? Really there should exist HP bestiaries with vintage pictures.

This is what happens if you don't tag compulsively, you never find things again. I really should start again to tag all art I look at, just like I do with fic.

Also, and this is a totally random topic shift, I got a tiny tomato plant yesterday. Not that I have a garden or anything, but I thought that maybe I could attempt to grow one in a largish flower pot in my kitchen, which is really sunny and there is a good spot for it near the window where it isn't in the way. I suspect that even with the large pot I choose to put it in it probably won't grow as well or as large as it would in a garden, but I thought it'd be nice to see something grow, and I'm not really a flower person. I mean, if it does lead to some fresh tomatoes that would be great, but it wouldn't be a big loss of an investment if it turned out that tomatoes really need an actual garden with real beds, after all it was only 60 cents for the plant, plus the 80 cent for the bamboo stick I also got with the optimistic anticipation that it might grow successfully and I'd have to bind it to something, like all the tomato plants I've seen in gardens are. I guess I'll see how it goes soon enough.

Comments

[gnatkip.livejournal.com]

Ha, you know me too well. That sounds fantastic, and like something I would be in love with. It doesn't ring any bells, though, unfortunately.

[ratcreature]

Heh, well browsing your art was fun even if I didn't find the art I had in mind. Too bad though that it doesn't ring a bell for you.

I mean, I started thinking about this because I considered drawing some fantasy monsters for fun, and that I haven't yet drawn any HP magical creatures, which then led me to the place of creature compendiums, shortly followed by the realization that I'm not really good at imitating styles, and this niggling feeling that I had seen something like this posted somewhere. I mean the underlying concept is general enough that I don't think it would be perceived as copying someone else's idea if I did another version, but still. With HP fanart I frequently feel that I don't really need to draw any because there is so much of it covering everything already.

Though I think I may try doing this, though I'm not sure yet which style of book illustration I even could fake, i.e. roughly whether to try for a true medieval bestiary style, though I'd think I'd go more for something like proto-science compendiums trying to collect knowledge but not impart moral allegories because I'm not much inot Christian symbolism, or for a later style of the time when there were fledgeling natural sciences and the first real encyclopedias like Diderot's with plates of observed plants and animals, like a more 18th century feel. Though I think the naturalism required for the latter and doing it in b/w ink might be beyond my skills...

I'm thinking for the more medieval I could start based on the contents of an entry for a creature of "Fantastic Beasts" from the A-Z part, convert the text into some older English, like from Chaucer's time or something -- though I'd need to enlist help for that, I can't even understand Chaucer, let alone reproduce something like that but I figure it would be more accessible than going for a Latin rendering, which I also couldn't produce myself anymore despite four years of suffering in school -- then do an illustration that ideally would look like a woodcut maybe, and render the text next to it in the style of an old book, though I'd have to brush up on my calligraphy skills for that, or maybe go the easy route and use the computer to do it via fonts, or maybe a combination of doing the decorated initial by hand and the rest with a font. And somehow make the paper look old too as digital afterwork (though again I have no clue how I'd go about that, but then maybe I'd find a tutorial somewhere and my skills would grow with the challenges...)

For the 18th century variant the text would just need to be made somewhat more old fashioned, I guess, and could be typeset, but the picture would have to look like an engraving and more realistic.

[gnatkip.livejournal.com]

I thought about this some more last night, and wondered if there's not an artfinders community. I don't remember hearing of one, but most fandoms seem to have at least one ficfinders. You'd think there might be one, somewhere.

"the underlying concept is general enough that I don't think it would be perceived as copying someone else's idea if I did another version"

I wouldn't think so at all, no. And your ideas are so exciting! If you decide to go through with this it's going to be fantastic. I think either time period has its merits, and either would be good. I hear that you can age paper with tea or coffee. And if you were going for a vellum look, you could even have some text appear to be ghosting through as if from the other side? Exciting!

[ratcreature]

I think I'll try this. I've been doodling around this afternoon withsome rough ideas of how to make a bowtruckle look for a start, because I thought a tree guardian might be fun (and also that it could be cool to do some of the less favorite beasts like this, like not just do basilisks or hippogriffs and such).

And I've heard about staining paper with tea. That's a good idea instead of doing it digitally. I think I'll experiment with on some paper to see how it'll look and whether it works better to do it before or after putting the ink drawing on the paper (with waterproof ink obviously). I have some spiced black teabags around that turned out to be not to my taste at all, and which have thus been sitting on my shelf for ages, that would at least still make use of them, and not waste perfectly good tea for dye either. (The moments packrat tendencies come in handy. *g*)