This page is not what the link you clicked said it was; sorry about that! When links in the fic you're reading don't go to a real-world webpage or to a fake social media post, they send you here instead, where you get out-of-universe author's notes.
Here's an informal process blog for The Temptation of Amadeo and INDIA TIBI CESSIT, since the two are closely related!
The original plan was that I, graiai, would do the lineart and underpainting for all of the artwork in this fic, and then would ship the Riccardo underpainting to unravelledclementines to finish in her own style, so the results would feel like they did in fact come from different artists, while I finished up the "Alice" version. Unfortunately, those underpaintings were lost in transit, leading unravelledclementines to have to take my original sketches and transfer them by hand, redo the underpainting, etc, costing us a lot of time. But it got done in the long run!
Step one for both of these pieces was the preliminary sketch. I referred to the description of Marius' Temptation provided in TVC for the broad strokes of the composition, but expanded on them pretty extensively to root the artwork specifically in Venice while still linking to the Timurid Renaissance and Oriental Mode. Another fannish interpretation (made for TVC specifically, not IWTV 2022) of Temptation that I was blown away by, incidentally, is sheepskeleton's here.
My sketches were done digitally with Inkscape and a regular computer mouse, absolutely nothing fancy. I like working digitally at this stage because it's much easier to change elements of the composition. As an aside, you can tell the Madonna dell'Orto is the very first thing I drew because it's way more painstakingly detailed than any other part of the background!
I did preliminary shading digitally for this one as well, because I wanted to make sure I was happy with the values before I started. I didn't bother with the tiles because I knew already loosely what I wanted them to look like.
At this point, it was time to get it onto the panel. These next three photos are all from the original underpainting that I did and got lost in the mail: inking (done admittedly lazily with a micron pen instead of going straight for egg tempera), then an underpainting in egg tempera using umber and titanium white, followed by Verdaccio, a technique where you make the skin in your underpainting green to add more realistic depth and counteract the pink tones of the paint that comes later. I should also admit now that doing linework like this is (as I understand it) not typical to the Venetian school and is more associated with Florentine painters, but I'm not skilled enough to pull off lineless egg tempera. We'll call the linework another Timurid influence.
I apologize for the low quality images, but I hope it's interesting, at least! Anyway, this isn't exactly what the underpainting would've looked like for the version of Riccardo's student-copy of Temptation that made it into the finished fic, thanks to the whims of the postal service, but the process will have been largely the same. Temptation was at this point out of my hands, and into [anonymous contributor]'s. Here's Riccardo's in-progress painting:
This brings us to INDIA TIBI CESSIT! I wanted to make relatively few changes to the core visuals, so that the appropriation art element really came through as well as the stylistic differences in the actual painting. The first step was designing the square Kufic for the pillars. Square Kufic is often incredibly intricate and geometric in a way that is absolutely fascinating but that my brain struggles with, so I decided to keep it relatively simple. Each couplet begins the first half in the upper left and the second half in the lower right.
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Once that was done, I could replace the artwork with the ghazal and start with the other changes. Here's the finished lineart:
From here is really where my suffering began, because I got it into my head Armand would like lino. I started out by printing my digital sketch and using carbon paper to trace it out onto my lino, and then spent 20-30 hours carving it? I got through several seasons of an old TV show while working on this, and some of the details were so fine I had to carve them with a sewing needle. Armand would love this shit. I was having a few regrets. 1000 word equivalent, by the way.
With the carving done, I added a bit of archival ink for color contrast and hit up the library's scanning bed...
...and that was the hardest part done. I jury-rigged a small bookbinding press with the biggest hardcover book I had to get full coverage on the wood panel, and it worked surprisingly well. The texture of the (very thick) oil-based ink on the gessoed panel was really fun, although unfortunately doesn't show up the best in photos.
All that was left to do at this point was paint! I used egg tempera in a very limited palette (only three pigments), using a pointilism style to give the art a relatively unique texture, and then, because I was very, very afraid of messing it up if I did it directly on the painting and I was coming up on the due date, I painted the "INDIA TIBI CESSIT" on a second, paper print of the lino, and photoshopped the two layers together.
And that's that! BACK TO THE FIC.