see how it is like a scar between their bodies, stronger, darker, and proud; how the black cord makes of them a single fabric that nothing can tear or mend.
- Jane Hirshfield, “For What Binds Us”
“Let me see.”
“It’s no different than the last five times you checked, will you quit worrying?”
“Dean, let me see or I swear to god I’ll tie you down and make you.”
“Kinky, Sammy, didn’t know you had it in you.”
Sam flushes. At thirteen, it feels like every other thing Dean says makes his face burn, which he knows is the only reason Dean says them in the first place. He’s had to get pretty good at ignoring them, otherwise the comments would be ten times worse. When Sam just stares, stone-faced and unrelenting, Dean pushes himself up into a sitting position on the couch with an aggrieved sigh and holds out his hand dutifully.
“Now, was that so hard?” Sam asks, taking Dean’s hand in his own and peeling back the edge of the gauze to get a look at the wound festering underneath.
“Woulda thought the harder the better,” Dean returns with a smirk. It would have been infuriating if it hadn’t clearly taken all his energy to summon it. “Don’t worry, Sammy, someday somewhere some girl will let you into her pants and you’ll figure it out.”
“One more dick joke and I’m duct-taping your mouth.” Sam holds up a hand when Dean’s mouth opens with the inevitable crude rejoinder. “Don’t.”
Dean just settles back into the couch, eyes closed, like he’s somehow won this round, and Sam returns his attention to Dean’s hand. He’ll need to unwrap and rebandage it again; he can already see the yellow pus oozing from the wound. Sam holds Dean’s wrist in one hand and unravels the bandage with the other, then very gently peels back the rest of the gauze. Dean flinches as the gauze tugs on his stitches, but aloud he just grumbles for the fifteen-billionth time, “Capable of doin’ this myself, you know.”
“You are a horrible patient, you know,” Sam says, also for the fifteen-billionth time. “I thought I was supposed to be the stubborn one.”
Sam tightens his grip on Dean’s hand and then douses it with peroxide, grinning when Dean hisses and yanks his hand back. “Wuss.”
“Your bedside manner could use improvement.”
“One, you’re not in bed, and two, nice nurses are wasted on dick patients. Now gimme your hand back so I can finish.”
Summary: Sam and Dean meeting up in an alleyway for a hunt on a late rainy evening. [Ao3]
For more art from me please check out my “myart” tag here on Tumblr. (Art Notes and Bonus Art below the cut)
Art Notes: I’ve been stuck in a drawing rut so bad lately. It was a struggle making this piece. But, I signed up as a pinch hitter, so I was determined to keep my word when they called on me. It’s funny because I find drawing younger Jared/Sam and younger Jensen/Dean to be so intimidating because there’s just a big limit on references from their younger years. But, then the mods made a post about being worried people would drop and that worried me. I’m a supporter of gencest and wincest things so I did want the zine to succeed.
So, I signed up as a pinch hitter with half of me hoping that I can do something at least half way decent if they call on me and the other half thinking that they probably won’t even need me. I’m just a back up in case someone else can’t do their work. But, come to find out for some unfortunate reason someone did drop out of teen section and I was called to make good on my promise. And for what it’s worth, I did make good on it.
The mods gave me somewhere around, I guess, 2 months? I got most of March and then all of April to finish. Starting from March 5, I started brainstorming questions and ideas right away. I asked if there was a collective zine theme besides the boys being teens. The mod told me the main theme was them growing up together. And I was going to go for gencest (though if people want to see it as wincest Idc, go ahead) I chose the option to have the boys doing regular teenager stuff with a hunter twist.
After that I asked if there was any additional info I needed and if I needed to be aware of what others were creating so we all didn’t create the same stuff, mainly because the last Zine I was in the mods were worried about that. There wasn’t any additional info that I needed, but the mod I was talking to did say go ahead and run any ideas I had about what I wanted to do by them and they’d check if I was doing something too similar to another artist. So, five days later I came back with two ideas that I was toying with, “a hot summer day stuck in a cabin/house/motel, or Sam and Dean in some kind of a dark back alley with neon lights”. The response I got back was that the latter idea was the most unique. So, I went forward with that idea.
So, before I started sketching Sam and Dean, I obsessively searched for refs of young Jared and Jensen and saving what I could find to my drive for ease of access. In the zine guidelines the teen section said 15-18 years old, which didn’t specify if that meant 18 for Sam or 18 for Dean. I took it as 18 for Sam. Which even though gives me a bigger range to work with, ends up making Dean technically a legal adult than a teen. But, I don’t specify the ages in this piece so I feel like there’s some plausible deniability with Sam being somewhere in his later teen years but before Stanford.
Anyways, I tried to concentrate on refs around those times, but Jared’s youth on the internet is pretty much non existent especially compared to Jensen. But, I tried my best even though I ended up mainly using refs from when Jared and Jensen were young adults. I did try to make them look younger than the refs tho, especially Sam. I shortened his chin a smidge and made him noticeable shorter than Dean who’s leaning against the wall, not even standing at full height. I also had to brainstorm what kind of hairstyle I wanted to put on Sam. I decided to give him something similar to his main season 1 hair, but a little shorter in length. And that’s mainly because I wanted this to look like Sam, rather than Jared and his other roles. I’m not sure how I feel about the final results. A lot of this work was me not really having concrete directions and me just playing around, for better or worse.
When I started, I sketched Sam and Dean first and then tried to sketch out a background that made sense for their positions. I keep trying to do backgrounds, but I don’t know if I’m getting any better at them. It’s definitely not my worst, but I feel like it could be better somehow.
On March 30th, the first check in was due and I had pretty much finished my sketch. I changed my mind on it being nighttime with neon lights in the background and wanted to color it with daytime in mind. I thought daytime might be easier to color and render. And, I told the mods that “I feel good about my progress, and I’m pretty sure I’ll be done before April 25th,” which was the final check in on the schedule.
After that I made the line art and colored in the base colors. I put a free texture on the brick wall, and copy, paste, and vertically flipped a reflection of the background building for the background pavement. I added in the signs and fonts with Photoshop Elements 15. But, when I started to add shading and lighting, I changed my mind again. I wanted it to be raining, and the boys are taking cover by some kind of overhang in the alleyway. But, I still wanted it to be daytime, but on like a really cloudy evening where light is barely shining through the clouds. In the end, it ended up being darker than I initially was going for. So, it like full circled back to nighttime by the end.
As some late additions, I added water drops to the foreground, because sometimes water gets stuck to the camera lens, windows, glasses, or eyelashes in rainy scenes and I thought it’d be cool. And, I added a faint passing car light to be the main light for Sam and Dean’s shadows on the wall, or at least that was the idea, anyways. I also did try to add graffiti to the wall too, but it felt really distracting so I ended up making it really faint.
Towards the end, I pretty much got sick of looking at and fiddling with it. I get somewhat obsessive sometimes, where I can’t let things go. And, it’s like the little things in this piece would be driving me crazy, but I couldn’t figure out what it was. I was at that point where continuing to try to fix whatever I was bothering me had just as much a likelihood of making the piece worse. So, on April 18th, I turned it in. And then, I waited for May 2nd when the Zine would be officially posted. The next day after I made and submitted my personal art posts. And that’s pretty much everything.
Looking back at it now, I’m pretty happy with how my Sam and Dean turned out. I need to work on my background and composition skills (those seem to be what I always struggle with the most) but overall I feel pretty good about the whole thing. I probably need to force myself to experiment more with free flowing, simple, blurry styles instead of my go to where everything has a defined shape. But, saying it vs actually breaking out of my comfort zone is an up hill battle.
Bonus Art:
This is just a peek behind the curtains. I took out the rain, reflection, fog, atmosphere filter, some of the lighting, the car light, and one shading layer. In some ways this version is better for being less complicated, but I do like the moodiness in the official version. I’m mainly sharing this to compare and contrast with the main, and to show that yes, I did intend for daytime initially when coloring, lol.
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