Heir of Fire Fanart Contest

Hello everyone! I wanted to share my entry for Bloomsbury's Heir of Fire contest, and show you some of the process (and some outtakes from the 'shoot'). First, here's my final product... it was made to be the size of a desktop wallpaper, so if you want to see the bigger version, just click the picture.

When I'd heard about this contest a few days ago, I knew this was what I wanted to do. Of course, the final product doesn't look exactly like my mental image of what I'd hoped to achieve, but it's a close as I could get it. The quote I picked was what immediately came to mind when I decided to try my hand at making fanart. It's a heavily used quote in the fandom on Tumblr, but for good reason. It encapsulates an important aspect of Celaena's character so well.

Let's get into the process!

I took several pictures with the intent of having a headshot and a silhouette. I ended up abandoning the silhouette in favor of a plain distant shot. (I want to say "body shot" but I'm fairly sure that means something quite different from what I mean...) Partly because I wasn't sure how I would go about editing a silhouette into the shot, partly because I had trouble taking proper silhouette shots. Here are the unedited versions of the pictures I went with;

The headshot! I cut myself from the background and attempted to lighten my hair to be more like Celaena's... which was made slightly difficult by my uncertainty about what kind of 'blonde' she is. Sometimes she's portrayed as a yellowy blonde, and sometimes (namely in the book covers) she has white blonde hair. I ended up going for something in-between. 

And, obviously, this was the distant shot that I picked. I had to lock my dogs in for this one, since my giant rottweiler believes stepping on our grass warrants a wrestling match. I wore heels, because it felt more like Celaena than everything else I had, but kept sinking into the ground because of it. I put a belt around my waist rather than letting the cloak flow out, because Celaena is not one to hide her figure without good reason. The background of this photo ended up as the background for the finished product, although it ended up being heavily edited.

This is what one of the early versions looked like... before I fixed the background (mainly to make text more readable) and messed with the saturation of everything. My hair was also not fully edited at this point. The lightening I'd done on the picture to the right made my roots look blue-grey.

Outtakes

Dog invasion. Tryna take super serious selfies over here, dogs. I actually have several attempted shots that I took before I realized one of them was sitting next to me. (None of them were good anyway.)

I'd also like to note that all of my neighbors decided it was a good time to be outside. At 11am. On a Monday. Watching me frolic around with sword and cloak and camera. *groan*

I tried to take some pictures with the sword out, but I've come to realize that there is either no way to hold a sword without appearing awkward, or it's just me. The way I'd belted the cloak wasn't helping either; I couldn't move my arms very much. Not too mention my feet kept getting cut out of the frame, as evidenced in this photo.

And just for kicks, here's what the outfit looked like from the front. I really liked how belting the cloak made the front drape around my legs. My plain Under Armour t-shirt looks a bit out of character though! Ha.

Anywho, that's all I wanted to share today. Have any of you ever tried anything like this? And WHO ELSE IS EXCITED FOR HEIR OF FIRE?

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