fanart - baucis

[reira]

This is my submission for the hd_inspired Back To School fest. Reading through the comments, I realized that it needs a commentary to be comprehensible. Sorry, I fail at communicating.

Title: Baucis (with commentary)
Characters: Harry/Draco
Rating: G
Media: Pencil and charcoal
Summary: Draco, stuck inside Baucis (Hogwarts) because of his arm, looks down at the Earth.
Notes: Drawn from a prompt submitted by rurouihime. The words are from "Invisible Cities" by Italo Calvino.



0. First of all, I want to talk about the quote. It's from one of the best italian books of
the 20th century, "Invisible Cities". I think there is a translation in English, so if you get the chance, I absolutely recommend to read it.

From Wikipedia:
The book explores imagination and the imaginable through the descriptions of cities by the narrator, Marco Polo. The book is framed as a conversation between the aging and busy emperor Kublai Khan, who constantly has merchants coming to describe the state of his empire, and Polo. The majority of the book consists of Polo's descriptions of 55 cities. [...] One of Calvino's masterpieces, the novel does not fall under the aegis of either magical realism, science fiction, or speculative fiction, and in fact is closer to poetry than classic novel writing. In the end, the book creates its own universe, neither that of a futuristic world or one based on classic fantasy fiction nor does it obey E.M. Forster's classic model for the story, but creates a new form.

Baucis is the central city of the book, the most important one. It's the invisible city and its inhabitants never descend on the Earth ("After a seven day's march through woodland, the traveler directed toward Baucis cannot see the city and yet he has arrived. The slender stilts that rise from the ground at a great distance from one another and are lost above the clouds support the city. [...] Nothing of the city touches the earth except those long flamingo legs on which it rests and, when the days are sunny, a pierced, angular shadow that falls on the foliage.")

Draco, alone in one of the towers of the castle, isolated from the world outside of Hogwarts, and Harry, a symbol of the Earth that barely touches him, immediately came to my mind.





1. This is Harry in the Hogwarts grounds. The only things that could make clear where he is are the Quidditch hoops on the right. I purposely didn't add anything else, I wanted to give an impression of airy space, of freedom. Harry lives in a world without borders, Draco can't move from the castle.






2. In the previous panel Harry's hand is about to touch something outside the scene. It's this cat. When I drew this illustration, I had in mind the last one. They're twin illustrations: in this one, Harry strokes the cat, a living being, a symbol of the world he is actually plunged in. I thought about drawing Hermione or Ron or any other human being, but I wanted Harry to be the only focus of Draco's attention.
Harry is totally unaware of Draco's gaze, obviously.






3. This panel is divided in two parts: the darkness behind Draco is Hogwarts' thick wall, his prison, the light from the window is Harry, his hope.






4. And this is the panel that is supposed to explain why Draco is stuck inside Hogwarts. In contrast with Harry's, Draco's hand is holding a cigarette. When I think about solitude, I don't know why, but cigarettes are the first objects that came into my mind. And, when I think about serenity and peace, I think about cats.
So, that's one of the reasons I wanted to draw two close-ups on hands.

Then there is the question of the Dark Mark. If you notice, there is a wound on Draco's wrist, beside the mark. During the war Draco wanted so badly to scratch out the Dark Mark that he hurt himself, only to find out that the injured mark left a curse on him: he could not leave the place where Voldemort was killed.

And that's all. I hope it's clearer now. :)

Comments

[elanorofcastile.livejournal.com]

Totally. In a way, 'Invisible Cities' reminds me of 'The Mysteries of Harris Burdick', by Chris Van Allsburg.

I would love to show you my things, though I would preface it by saying that it was a digital media class, so I had to create a short film, website, composition in photoshop, and a two page spread layout. The city that I had chosen was Thekla, because a chunk of campus, near where I lived, was under construction, and it just kind of spoke to me. Here (http://sophia.smith.edu/~jwoolley/projects.html) is the link to my projects page, though I will warn you, the website looks all sorts of messed up in IE, since I designed it for Firefox. I definitely need to go back and clean it up, since I created it a few years ago, but I haven't gotten around to it, yet. :P

[reira-21.livejournal.com]

Thekla is one my favourite cities from the book and I think your art is a wonderful representation of it! Your final composition, after the color study, made me think of multiple layers, as the city never stops the process of being constructed, one layer after another. Well done!