#also crowley doesn't really have a jawline here

[ineffablenlghtingales]

Okay, here it is. So I did a thing.

a very silly attempt at drawing this:

I only did the top halves because too lazy and proportions are not my forte whoops.

[cobragardens]

Omf I love the ichor dripping from their disintegrating halo onto their forehead--where the chrism would be drawn in the shape of a cross during a christening, i.e., giving a newly born person a name, ha.--and trickling down their face to form the snake sigil.

There's a lot going on in this piece, and it's all so fricking cool. I love the way you've lined Crowley's head and jawline up with their torso, extending their neck and running their hair parallel in the back to give a long, smooth, snakey profile.

The streaks of other angels falling in the distance really got me. I didn't notice them at first, and realizing what I was looking at--and then realizing that Crowley would have seen and recognized the same thing in the moments before the moment this piece depicts--had a big sickening crunch of an emotional impact. Christianity suffuses our culture to such a degree that its elements start to seem normal by sheer ubiquity no matter how horrifying they are, and I think it's an uphill battle for an artist to get an audience to really feel the "Holy shit, that's awful" compassion and horror that's necessary to make Biblical fiction fresh and compelling. And you hit it out of the park for me with that sequential recognition of the falling angels and then the light-colored clouds rising from the ground as clouds of smoke or dust from impacts.

Part of what puts the time delay on recognizing the other falling angels and the rising smoke is the elegant visual unity you've got going on here. The squiggly tangle of the crumblemeltbleeding halo is echoed in the jaggedly fluffed line of Crowley's wing, in the tattered hemline of the garment, in the wavy strands of Crowley's hair, and in the clouds.

You've also got all kinds of strong diagonal lines running from top right to bottom left--the line of Crowley's body, the lines of Crowley's hair, the lines of Crowley's legs, the overall direction of the clouds, and the streaks of the falling angels. Top-right-to-bottom-left is the opposite of Western reading and stage direction, and the visual pull "backwards" creates a sense of wrongness and unease even as it contributes to that visual unity. So holistically the piece looks really good, and viewed in detail it also hits really hard: it's a very beautiful picture of a very ugly event.

I love also the beautiful robe. The choice to make it luminous but transparent really grabs me; that's such a great visual symbol of both Heaven's purity (which is where we've seen that glowy overexposed whiteness before) and the fact that Heaven is not really fit for purpose (the purpose of clothing is to cover and protect the person wearing it, but this fabric doesn't do either). It also suggests a story that we see other glimpses of in canon: the gold embroidery on the neckline and sleeves of the Starmaker's canonical robe is absent here, just as the gold embroidery at Aziraphale's neck seems to have been torn away from of their robe when they speak to Crowley on the Wall above the Eastern Gate of Eden.

And I love Crowley's expression here. You've packed so much into it; I don't just see pain and desolation and grief, but also, in the eyebrows and the narrowed eyes, a thoughtfulness, an observation. I feel like this moment you give us in this piece is the moment that crying out to God turns into "You're not going to answer, are you" for Crowley. It's perhaps the moment they see with certainty the nature of the universe and their Creator.

When I first saw this piece I was like "Oh, that's really pretty." The longer I look at it, the more disturbing and compelling and thoughtfully crafted I realize it is. It hits the underrated horror aspect of Good Omens really well, and with heart-savaging empathy. It's beautiful and romantic and awful, and I love it.

oh well.