Art Corner: Making the Vol II Street Team Illustrations!

Earlier this week, I released the lock screen rewards for the Glass Scientists: Volume II Street Team campaign. Which you can still join, by the way! Today I wanted to talk a little more about how I arrived at these two illustrations, as well as a third spicy piece that didn’t quite make the cut.

First up, let’s talk angels and demons:

I’d originally planned on making a different piece to dramatize the shifting power dynamic between Jekyll and Hyde at the end of Chapter 15 (see below), but last week I was disassociating in the middle of a deadlifting set to Lady Gaga’s Disease*, and this image just popped into my head. As soon as I got home, I scribbled down the rough sketch (left), which I then tied down a few weeks later (right).

And, yeah, they don’t have clothes at this point. I swear this is for Art reasons rather than Horny reasons—my primary focus is always on character posing and emotion, so I like to work with simplified “nude” forms that let me see at the underlying flow of the characters without the obstruction of voluminous clothing. The angel/devil wings contribute to the flow as well, but I was reasonably confident that I could pull those off without too much pre-planning. The tricky part was the interaction between Jekyll and Hyde—if I couldn’t make that look good, there was no point moving forward with the sketch at all.

*I’ve been a Gaga fan for well over a decade now and absolutely geeking out over the recent return to her early, slightly-body-horror-y theatrical performances. Also, I space out between sets with some frequency, especially on leg day. I don’t see why trans mascs have to do leg day. I think we should be excused.

I wanted to dress the characters in costumes from the Disease video, but I didn’t want to put Jekyll in a dress for personal gender dysphoria reasons, and Gaga’s outfit in the second verse was too simple to be easily recognizable. For some reason, it didn’t bother me to put Hyde in a dress, maybe because his look is not particularly gender-goals-y for me, but it was a real pain trying to get a good look at Gaga’s black dress through all the harsh lighting and particulates, so I settled for a rough approximation.

I ended up dressing Jekyll in a costume inspired by Tilda Swindon’s Gabriel from the 2005 adaptation of Constantine, a design of such potent Gender I’m surprised it’s not banned in the UK. I don’t remember much about the film beyond that because as soon as they came onscreen I passed out and woke up several hours later with a prescription for HRT.

Oh, also Jekyll is blue here, because the white design in last year’s lock screen was apparently quite painful to look at in the dark. Sorry about that!

Next, we have the sock hop with Jasper and Rachel:

This one came from a couple of places.

One: I noticed a reader mention that their mother hadn’t wanted them using the Jekyll lockscreen from the first campaign because he was giving “bedroom eyes.” Which, in fairness, he was. I thought it would be fun to bring a little sexiness into the illustrations, but I had forgotten the acute mortification of being a teenager and having to explain sexy anime fanart to an eavesdropping parent. The ending of Adolescence of Utena still haunts me.

Two: I drew this shortly after the inauguration here in America and needed to inject some trans joy into an otherwise decidedly unjoyful week. I enjoy the cheerful defiance of taking a decade beloved by conservatives everywhere and filling it with the gays, the theys, and the BIPOCs.

I hadn’t planned to make a second lock screen, but this image popped into my head and translated so seamlessly into its initial sketch that I couldn’t ignore it. Honestly, that first scribble still has a clarity to it that didn’t fully translate to the final pose, but that’s always a danger when you go to tie things down. I don’t remember where I saw this weird dance move—Grease? Westside Story?—but I love the way those enormous 1950s petticoats fan out as they flip upside down.

Finally, onto the problem child:

This was my original plan for the lock screen, inspired by a certain scene from Revolutionary Girl Utena. (Click at your own risk—this is peak spoiler territory.) One of my biggest motivations for starting The Glass Scientists was getting to tell a version of the Jekyll and Hyde story where Jekyll was just as dangerous as Hyde—he may not look spooky scary on the outside, but his capacity for repression and profound self-hatred make him the deadlier of the two.

I’d had this image in my head for months, but when I sat down to draw it, I couldn’t quite get it over the finish line.

The trouble was that I was working from a very specific pose reference (IYKYK) but when I went searching for image reference, I discovered the pose was ever-so-slightly different from the one I had in mind, and the characters were at slightly different heights than I needed (notice how Jekyll is shorter than Hyde in the initial sketch). I tried gently modifying the poses, but my discomfort with sort of matching the reference but not really eventually killed my enthusiasm for the picture entirely. It also just occurred to me that (in the fully tied-down piece) Jekyll should probably be layered in front of Hyde for the stabbing action to make sense.

Looking back at it now, I think I might have been too harsh on this one. It kinda works! I might finish it up at some point and add it to the lock screen folder for folks to use. But time was running out and I needed to get these out the door, so I decided to shelve this one in favor of the two pieces I was more confident in.

All right, that’s it for the very first Art Corner! I went on longer than I originally meant to, but honestly I felt I could have gone on even longer. What did y’all think? Let me know if you’d like to see more of these in the future!

If you’d like one of these lock screens for your very own, there’s still time to join the Glass Scientists street team here:

And, of course, you can still buy The Glass Scientists: Volumes I and II wherever books are sold, or grab signed copies here: