Flash (August 2, 2002) - trying to stave off hunger pangs for new eps (2 months? I want it now!) I've been rewatching some of my fav season 2 Angel eps. This piece is based on the maybe 60 seconds of whirlwind action at the end of the Angel-gets-the-ring segment of "Reprise". Angel unmasks Darla (who is back to being a vampire at this point) at a W&H ceremony, Lilah yells "stake the bitch" (still bitter about Darla & Dru nearly killing her, I guess!), Lindsey punches her out (demonstrating that he's too crazy-in-love to be bitter that Darla & Dru also nearly killed *him*), then rushes off to pull some thug off Darla and helps her to the door, and just before she runs out, she gives him this incredibly pregnant look, the full ramifications of which I have yet to fathom, 'cept to say that it was really cool. Then Lindsey and Lilah shoot each other some if-looks-could-kill glances. Oh yeah, and Angel does this thing with the demon and the ring; just plotty stuff, what really stayed with me and inspired the collage was the whole Darla-Lindsey-Lilah angle. The title is because I couldn't think of anything better, from all the flashed looks going on, and also how it all happened in a flash.

Started by building the central banner bit. Captures were a little sub-standard, so I did the best I could to bleach Darla out (median/noise & diffuse glow on a lumonisity mask) and fade Lindsey/Lilah down. Applied a bunch of copy-layers, motion blurred horizontally, and some overlaid roshiweb.com custom brushes.

Copy pasted my final result to a new document, and enlarged the canvas to add extra space at the bottom and top. Made the framing lines by selecting a narrow band from the middle with the marquee tool and putting copies at the top and bottom (bottom one reversed horizontally so they wouldn't be exactly the same). Took little snap shots of the main Darla picture and made those into the little squares on the bottom right corner. Did the same for Lindsey at the top left. Made the swoop using the pen tool to create the swoopy path (not easy, let me add! I'm not 100% satisified with the shape I came out with) then filled the selection with a color chosen from Darla's lips and played with the blend/opacity. At the last minute decided to overlay a shot of an LA city scape (from gettyone.com) with blurred car head-lights (those diagonal lines starting below Darla's chin) over the central image, masked out bits and pieces of it to let the faces shine through.

So nothing spectacular, still, I'm reasonably pleased with how it ended up coming out, seeing as it was looking pretty blah when it was just the central image, before I enlarged the canvas.

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Val writes

I love the line and texture of Flash, it has such a great flow from side to side, love the swirly and of course, the boxes!!:) Nice subtle color too.