Woe, Faulkner Page Be Upon Ye

pov you are brother faulkner about to excute a Pro Prophet Move

speedpaint here

siltcord was talking about a rane + faulkner anglerfish saint, so i did what i had to do !! are anglerfish riverine? no, but neither is kelp. all waters are one baby

original convo is below, plus some design notes

speedpaint will be linked here

great contributions from @thermodynamic-comedian @lights-at-night-art and @unbloodiedmartyr that all contributed to my design :]

rane is growing into faulkner. faulkner is not growing into rane

rane has lost their face, faulkner's is only a mouth. rane has no identity in faulkner and his only identity is the words he speaks

faulkner is the one holding the lure, but rane is the one holding up his arm. it isn't clear how much say he has in their pose

faulkner's hand is growing into the lure because he can't let go/escape his position

the gossamer fins are intended to emulate angel's wings, the lure a halo

there are no prayer marks on them because i do not want to design parish prayer marks on the fly like this. imagine they were on their faces, chests, and stomachs if you must

theyre nude because ive seen a lot of greco-roman statuary lately and the pose was too nice to cover with robes. genuinely please dont be weird about it T_T

drowned dragged delivered

I don’t want your future, I don’t need your past, one bright moment, is all I ask

Y’all ever think about those first 16 days on the road, wading through mud and river sludge looking for proof that god is still on?

there’s them that lead and them that chase

i respect jon ware's decision to never make an official fun episode, but that aint me. enjoy that one tiktok trend with the sillies !

transcript (sry abt my handwriting) + my fav frames below !!

carpenter: I'm carpenter and my this is my first drink of the night.

off camera: carpenter? hhow many caprenter?

faulkner: I'm faulkner and this is my first drink of the night

off camera: FAULKNER! how many faulkner?

paige: I'm Paige and my first drink is vodka lemonade.

paige: kidding lol. Hehe imagine though. I don't know how many. We're on bottles now. I'm pretty functional. Just ask my cult.

[her bottle: Silt Russian VODKA]

hayward: I'm James Hayward and this is my first beer of the night

hayward: paaaaaaiiige. paiiiiaaiige...

[paige holds up 4 fingers]

These were the Silt Verses.

(closeups/design notes/rambling under the cut, because it took me over a month to make this so I'm going to be a little self-indulgent.)

spoilers for the whole podcast ahead!

Our protagonists! Notes:

Some of these came out more accurate to how I see them than others. Hayward in particular looks much less grimy and haggard than I imagine him. Carpenter, on the other hand, is perfect in my eyes. Shrue is (subconsciously) very much inspired by the wonderful @unbloodiedmartyr's rendition of them (thanks Sacha, your art goes insanely hard!)

Hayward and Paige face away, a nod to their final parting. Carpenter and Faulkner face one another, in deference to their final reunion.

Val and Shrue are both shown at the moment of their deaths.

Paige, the only character confirmed to survive the immediate finale, is the only one with closed eyes.

I'm a blond Faulkner truther. Sorry.

Someone left some really really insane tags on a Valpost I made like a month ago about how Val can alter her appearance as she pleases, but the Last Word can never convince her not to see the actual aftermath of her torture when she looks in the mirror, and it sent me a little crazy, so I was trying to capture that failing self-deceit here. She's meant to look absurdly young, but where the flames overlay her face, you can see the prayer marks and lacerations on her skin.

I had this out on my desk for days and every time a family member dropped by I had to frantically hide the fact I was drawing 'politician gets shot in the head' fanart. RIP.

These are the marks of the Many Below! They look Not Great enlarged, but hey ho. I wanted them to look hidden and incidental, separated in each corner as they are:

'Begin with a balbis on its side. Within the two spaces, a circle marked by a single dot.' Drawn in the silt of the White Gull River.

'Beneath this, a pair of concentric circles. Within the annulus, an ovoid with a slit - a staring eye.' Scrawled across the pug postcard Cross uses to write his idea to scapegoat Shrue.

'Under that, a lemniscate over a heptagram[...]' Made up of the ribbon that binds Mercer and Gage's rifles.

'[...]and three parallel lines beneath.' Faulkner's staff, broken into three pieces.

Interstitial illustrations. There are four sets of these, which (roughly) correspond to more stand-alone episodes & fan favourites. This is my favourite, for my beloved Chapter 36: All Lovers Part As Dust. I had a blast distilling recurring motifs of the episode into one little illustration, and I'm really proud of the result; I think it captures the match of sweet and bitter that the episode in question inspires. The clock points to the eleventh hour.

These are pretty self-explanatory: I couldn't pass up a chance to draw the inciting miracle of the series, and it made sense to pair it with the image of Paige and Hayward sailing downriver at the end of Season 2, an image which has always haunted me.

The hare and the owl are from Chapter 26, a symbol of the Wound Tree's emergence. The lobster and fish are intended as a nod to Faulkner and Rane, a character who I love but couldn't include more overtly. Lobsters are seen as a symbol of devotion and fidelity because, apocryphally, they mate for life, and yet the lobster here is without its pair. The fish was intended to be a remora, which swims beside sharks. (Yes, I'm aware remora are tropical sea-dwelling fish, and humbly beg any marine biologists reading this not to kill me on the spot).

The Killing And Violence Siblings!

These object illustrations were deliberately positioned as parallels and specifically reference Season 2, marking the point of the poem that is made up of that series' titles (an attention to the series chronology that roughly coheres throughout the piece. Very roughly.)

Mercer and Gage's rifles are twisted round with a red ribbon, which bleeds into the White Gull, binding them together and reflecting how they're rarely seen apart. The ribbon's also a deliberate parallel to the banner wrapping Carpenter and Faulkner's hands elsewhere in the art.

Carpenter's axe and Faulkner's sororicidal mirror shard are depicted alongside fish hooks, as though they're separated for much of the season, the Parish draws them back together in the end. Also an echo of Paige's line, 'Love is just a meat hook for you to catch me on.'

There's only blood on one of the rifles, in a nod to Mercer and Gage's uneven dynamic.

Bookend landscapes. The pages were intended to reference the Silt Verses as an in-story document, and represent the themes of truth, myth and record throughout.

The illumination!

It was always going to be a radio-- not a nod specifically to Sid Wright, but really to the use of broadcast, music and sound throughout the show. TSV's sound design is truly one of the things I admire most about it.

The radio is meant to be on Carpenter and Faulkner's dashboard, as they drive along the river in the very first episode, hence its positioning at the start of the poem.

I conceived this as the centre of the piece, and drew the rest around it.

aaaand that was a lot. I didn't cover everything, and I recommend clicking on the final piece to get full quality and see how the details interact with one another-- but if you've read through all these meanderings, thank you, sibling. I started this two weeks after the finale, and managed a full relisten while drawing. It's been a labour of love, and I now hate watercolours more than I have words for.

final reunions - and final partings.

those silts do verse