Hades
Hades, the Fates, and some questionably functional scissors.
posted
complete
About my Hades project
To get creatively inspired for this month’s theme of “Hades”, I listened to the excellent soundtrack to the excellent game Hades. The song “In The Blood” shows up near the end of the game, sung by Eurydice and Orpheus on the way back to the House of Hades.
Fates weave their threads
Our lives are sewn
I wasn’t yet sure how, but those opening lines stuck with me and would become my inspiration for this month. I circled a few ideas before deciding to use the Fates from the animated Hercules (1997) movie. Despite their short screentime, those characters were always my favorite, and “What’s wrong with these scissors?” is still a regular thing I say.
How I made it
I took a still from near the end of the film as the Fates try to cut Meg’s life (just before my scissors line!).
I cut out the pieces I wanted, pumped up the contrast, and converted to a vector file. My intention was to make it look like shadow puppets, or possibly a paper cutout. This took a lot of trial and error with inner and outer shadows of various sizes, colors, and blur. Digital tools make this all pretty easy to do, but it still took a while to dial in details that I can barely tell the difference on. Worth it!
Usually I use Procreate on my iPad or Affinity on our struggling Mac Mini, but this time I stayed with web apps. I wanted to see how far I could get using only Penpot (an alternative to Figma). Penpot works great for vector stuff, but didn’t have much to help me go from movie screenshot to svg. I took a temporary stop at the free Canva options for removing the background and playing with contrast. Then once there was a nice, distinct silhouette I took my image to a free online png-to-svg tool. They all feel a bitch sketchy so I am not linking one.
I have an “assets” folder in my personal files where I collect things. I went through a few collections before deciding on a heavy weave white paper for the background. I think this is the first time I have used something from the ol’ vault and I am jazzed.
It’s simple, but I like it. I also watched Hercules while working on this and that just cranks my jazz to 11.