All the World's a Stage

Dedicated to , *Feiuccia : ) She drew a lovely piece for me that went outside her boundaries, and she experimented with style and colors. So... here's a gift back : ) A fun holiday inspired piece of Naruto and Sasuke : ) I also went outside of my usual boundaries : D Which is hilarious because the -ENTIRE- time coloring this, I had several songs by Adam Lambert on repeat on iTunes, and according to iTunes, I listened to his version of "No Boundaries" 16 times while working on this lololol.

So some of you may be wondering what I was thinking. The original idea was to simply draw a kiss between the two, but then I thought it'd be symbolic if they had strings like marionettes, and Sasuke was cutting it. But then I went a step further and decided to have them both suspended on it, as if they were actors in a play. So, I made their tail and wing "props" obvious costumes, and put a whole lot of symbolism into the stage.

The sun, the will of fire, the light, is all on Naruto's half, and Sasuke's half is cloudy, with the moon. I originally had the trees as snow, but it threw off the composition of the image to have that area white, plus you couldn't even see the snow coming from the cloud (suspended on strings of course. It's a stage set). I also threw in the idea of "fire and ice" for the fire vs. snow. I also designed the piece to look like 2D overlapped on 2D, as if it were a paper cut-out play. Oh yeah, and I made the demon wing candles because of two reasons 1) my friend suggested I draw Icarus' wings, and show them melting. Problem was, they looked -HORRIBLE- melting... so let's just pretend the candles were JUST lit, and will begin to melt shortly : P , and 2) since it's also a bit of a holiday inspired piece (by the idea of a school putting on a holiday show), I thought it'd be nice to include some candles for the occasion. That, and it reminds me of Chanukkah a bit. Since I'm from a Jewish family (though I'm personally agnostic), I don't -technically- celebrate Christmas, so this is my tribute to you Jews out there too, who never get holiday plays dedicated to you : P

I ultimately decided to combine the strings holding up their torsos into one string that splits and supports both of them. And, I made it a red string of fate, so it further symbolizes Sasuke cutting bonds with Naruto... in addition to cutting the string just to be a dickwad : P

And then I wrapped Sasuke in a bow for good measure. Hey, the bow is canon! : P

I originally entitled this piece "Angels and Demons", but it seemed that my watchers on Y!Gallery didn't understand what the image was about. So, with the renaming, maybe it'll make more sense on first glance : )

This piece is also inspired by ,~La-Vita-a-Colori whom if had not befriended, I would never have gotten the idea to draw this. And also, inspired by ,*e-nat, who told me that I'm pretty decent with the Photoshop "pencil" tool. I never gave it a chance before, but after spending 2 days on this baby, I love the pencil to death. I think I'm going to do many more pieces with it : )

And of course, all thanks goes to , ~Kuromu who supported me through the entire indecision I had when coloring the initial version of this, which I scrapped entirely to start over from scratch: [link]