#20yearsofbullets

[mysticsparklewings]

My Decadent Romance

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Happy 20th Birthday to My Chemical Romance’s I Brought You My Bullets, You Brought Me Your Love! 🥳

Also sorta Happy Birthday to the band, as it was their first album release. 🎉

AND Happy belated National Ice Cream Day, which was July 17th—Hence my dessert mashup.🍦

I did a similar thing for Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge’s Birthday in June, & while I didn’t plan to do it again, when I noticed the dates this month I couldn’t help myself.😋

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I really hadn’t intended on following up on My Delectable Romance. It seemed very much like a one-time thing since it was, in my mind, unlikely that something like National Donut Day and a My Chemical Romance album anniversary would come mere days apart again. Yet here I am a month later. 😂 As it turns out, July 17th was National Ice Cream Day, and My Chemical Romance has another album anniversary (this time for their first: I Brought You My Bullets, You Brought Me Your Love) today, July 23rd. Once again, exactly 5 days apart. 😃 I had so much fun last time I felt like I had to at least try and see where this one might take me. [And to be fair, yes, I did originally want to post this on Sunday but I finished it a little too late in the day so I held it back 'til today.] Fellow MCR fans can probably recognize without a word from me that this one was trickier. Bullets’ album cover is the most abstract among the main 4 they released, and quite possibly in their whole discography, too. The only 100% solid imagery is the silhouette of Harry Houdini dangling from his feet in the background (And yes, that is officially who/what that is if you were previously unaware like I was for quite a while after I became a fan!) The rest is a cacophony of maroons and yellow-orange. Still, even if I ended up hating what I came up with and scrapped the project, I wanted to give it a good honest try. And odd as it is, when I really stared at the official artwork, I could just make out a spot in the center where the shapes and colors could, in another universe, look like a hyperrealistic ice cream cone with a drizzle of chocolate syrup or hot fudge. I won’t deny for a second that if I hadn’t had the thought of ice cream in my head I never would have seen it and I’m 200% sure there is no hidden picture of ice cream there—This is simply the magic of the human psyche at play. But it was just what I needed, so I ran with it. 😉 I did my best to bring out what I saw, but admittedly even after significant tweaking, it’s still not 1:1 with what I could see in the original with my imagination. If I had another month to stare and tweak, maybe I could get closer, but that’s not the reality that we live in. 😅 So for the here and now, my hope is simply I managed to bring out what I could see enough that you Sparklers can see a definite ice cream cone and not just a blurry somehow-different-than-the-original mess. My process for this one was actually closer to what I did with Ghosts of Snow and Sun since I was using a mixture of faux oil and acrylic brushes in Procreate, doing lots of back and forth with the layers, etc. There was way more focus on blending here than there was with My Delectable Romance since my basis was more abstract. Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge’s cover still has abstract elements, but the main focus is definitely more graphic and solid in nature. Still, after I’d made decent headway on the ice cream center point, I could start on what I think is my favorite part of the final piece—That ice cream scooper where Houdini should be. 😂 I am so glad that idea popped into my head and I kept pushing until I found the right reference image because I think it ended up working so well! 😋 If you’re having trouble picturing it, this is the kind of ice cream scoop I was going for, as opposed to the simpler kind you’re more likely to have in your kitchen. I specifically wanted the more industrial feel since I thought it mimicked the texture and spirit of the Houdini silhouette better, even though the simple kind probably would’ve matched the general *shape* more closely. Though, contrary to the two points I just made: I actually brought back the sprinkle brush I originally used for Words that Kiss Day 19 where you can see it. Last time [My Delectable Romance, I mean] I used it to fill in the base background, and then just free-handed the clear visible sprinkles at the end. I’m not sure exactly why, but this time, early on I knew the sprinkles probably wouldn’t cut it for the background. Then when I got to the “topping” sprinkles [pun fully intended], I tried to free-hand a few, but it just felt wrong. So I tried the brush on a whim, and this time it feels right to me. Go figure. 🤷‍♀️ The text…Well, the visual style was pretty simple since I already had the right font installed from past MCR projects and I just needed to add a little extra grunge to the edges and a shadow to make it look closer to the official art. The issue there was just figuring out what the text should say. Last time it was easy because “Sweet Revenge” was already in the title and right on the money. “I Brought You My Bullets, You Brought Me Your Love,” really can’t be twisted to relate to sweets or even food in general with the same ease. I went through a couple of other variations—“I Brought You My Bowl, You Brought Me A Scoop/Spoon” or “I Brought You My Hunger, You Brought Me a Cone.” The bowl variation I came up with before I’d started on the artwork proper and had scribbled a 2-minute sketch in one of my IRL books so I’d remember the idea, so before I figured out the final art would use a cone and not a bowl for the ice cream. The original line, “I Brought You My Bullets, You Brought Me Your Love,” has such a poignancy to it; The narrator has something volatile and dangerous, and they are given love as a response. It’s hard to convey the same message while talking about ice cream, so I settled on the classic stereotype of a person eating ice cream/sweets when they’re upset. You come to your friend or lover sad, they offer to take you out for ice cream, that sort of thing. This won out among my options since there’s a song on the album, Our Lady of Sorrows, and there was a demo version released for that song titled Knives/Sorrow. It's not "right on the money" in the same way, but it did feel like it was sitting right there. And I changed the second “brought” to “bought” for the simple reason that if you give someone ice cream in a cone, especially the pointy-end kind, it’s more likely you bought the whole thing—cone, ice cream and all—from a shop on the corner, as opposed to buying the cone and ice cream separately at a big box store and preparing it yourself. It’s a veeeeeeeery subtle implication of “small-time business with a lot of care into the final product,” and that’s definitely what MCR was back when Bullets was first released. To say they’ve come a long way since then is an understatement, and somehow they managed to add more care instead of taking it away like so many other bands do when they “make it.” Oh, and one more text/word-related thing: I learned when double-checking my spelling on the title that while “Decadent” is used to mean a rich, luxurious dessert, it also means “characterized by or reflecting a state of moral or cultural decline.” Until today, I only ever knew of the dessert usage, but I am fascinated by the duality the word apparently has, and I find it incredibly fitting for MCR. 😊

So, like last time we’re left with this art that is, at its core, very silly, but it was fun to make and I’m glad I listened to that little voice in my head pushing me to just try it. 👍 Will we see the other two albums is silly dessert forms like this? I don’t know. It really depends…Not necessarily on if other dessert-related days come out around their anniversaries, though that would be a particularly good motivator. I think the fact I got 2 almost in a row was lucky enough 😆. Rather now it hinges more on if I can think of two more dessert-ish ideas that would work for them both…and remember their release dates in time. 😅 Either way, I can tell you guys I’ve already got some other non-dessert-ish MCR art waiting in the wings for the right time. (August, if things go according to plan 😉) So hopefully that’ll be something for you to look forward to while I get back to…other things... 👀

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Artwork © me, MysticSparkleWings

I Brought You My Bullets, You Brought Me Your Love and associated concepts © My Chemical Romance  

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⭐️ Like My Art and Want to see more of it? Here's All My Links! ⭐️