Bumbleby Big Bang 2021 Entry- The Goddess Across the Street

These are my pieces for the #BumblebyBigBang2021 event on Twitter and Tumblr, where artist and writers were paired to complete a minimum 1,500 word story and single fully rendered piece of art centering the Bumblebee ship from RWBY to be completed over the course of 4-6 months depending on scheduled posting day. For this community event I was paired with @kheru-post-randoms on Tumblr and simply @kheru on Archive of Our Own who's idea for the story was having the Fanus, a race that is similar to humans but have some visibly animal characteristic in cannon, be forgotten gods and goddesses and for our main goddess, Blake, that also means memory loss until memories, powers, even her personality suddenly seem to come back to her as she gets closer to Yang, her Waffle House co-worker. As we talked more and the story evolved it was brought up that we could do these cards of the main characters as book illustrations to hint at different themes and concepts throughout the story and linking the characters back to the cannon versions. It also felt important to have illustrations done of at least one of the major fights in the story, and excitedly I was able to finish both fight scenes by our 5 month deadline. Throughout this process there was consistent dialogue back and forth, even with a 9 hour time zone difference, about things such as the characters in the story; their relationship with side characters; character and environment design; posing and layout; making sure the feelings coming through where correct, for instance, which way should the cat ears point or if a face should have a softer expression; if the lighting and colors where in line with the writing the characters and influences and experiences that we brought to the project that felt more fantastical or exciting based on very different lived experiences. One of the by products of all our communications were some pretty wonderful jokes and a lot of laughs, which you get some of with the short comics. All of this was sketched, lined, painted, and rendered using Clip Studio Paint for iOS, with an exception being the background lines which were done in Autodesk Sketchbook for iOS. Completed NOV 2021

You can read our story, "The Goddess Across the Street" here:
https://archiveofourown.org/works/35047642/chapters/87295408