(no subject)

[kradeelav]

title: FEALTY

summary: a gift Sir Integra Hellsing gets for her sixteenth birthday, and what bootblacking means. illustrated fic.

website mirror: https://log.kradeelav.com/archives/1725

ao3 mirror (with transcript): https://archiveofourown.org/works/47494354

• oh my god the development of this one was tortured considering i started this mid 2020, redrew it 3 different times with 3 different styles, had to convert this from photoshop to krita, and very nearly wholesale abandoned it because I was not feeling it for the longest time. that said, about 3 weeks ago I got the idea to dust it off to practice using krita's (archaic) text tool in preparation for printing doujinshi, and somehow trimming this down from the imagined 8 page zine to this layout made all the difference.
• which speaking of, hells do i feel a lot more confident in project-managing and deciding which illusts to trash, what to leave in, how to format and compose each scene ... when I finally got down to it, this was probably the quickest project of all.  it feels extremely nice to concretely see that level-up in terms of confidence of project management and deliberately leaning into constructed choices rather than purely on intuition. doing all of these little mini projects was the best idea.  if i was only 30% happy with the overall composing/images before this final push, I'm probably 80% happy with it now which is pretty great for something that was redrawn versus redone from scratch.
• I remember being stuck in the middle for the longest time until I figured out I needed to write/draw the thing spiritually from Alucard's point of view since he's teaching her (kinda) in this moment -- passing the spiritual quality of bootblacking onto her.  what's funny to me is towards the end when I drew the last image (with old!integra, implying that timeskip years and years into the future), it ended up as a lovely little book-end to that POV twist back to her, cementing her maturity, power, Mastery, so on.
• that last image incidentally, also gave this fic a lot more heat than it had initially, which I'm grateful for. I wanted to show a glimpse of the 'other end' - whether that meant the other end of her life as mentioned above, and that hand-over from him introducing her to the tradition versus fully in subspace with them as a unit. the abstracted scythe/throne/scene on the coffin was also pretty deliberate in evoking the sense that she's bloodied, earned his service. she's protected them both from forces that wished them dead, and survived with defiance to spare - I'm reminded of the addams' family line there. "We gladly feast on those who would subdue us."