Reading

Fandom: Tolkien: Lord of the Rings
Characters/Pairing/Other Subject: Legolas & Gimli & Aragorn, Boromir & Faramir, Arwen/Aragorn
Content Notes/Warnings: none
Medium: traditional art (coloured pencils)
Artist on DW/LJ: n/a
Artist Website/Gallery: kaifarikus on tumblr
Why this piece is awesome: These lively sketches have a great style - based on book canon, I think. Also I love that Arwen is taller than Aragorn!
Link: LotR sketches

Good morning, afternoon, and evening!

We're doing some database and other light server maintenance this weekend (upgrading the version of MySQL we use in particular, but also probably doing some CDN work.)

I expect all of this to be pretty invisible except for some small "couple of minute" blips as we switch between machines, but there's a chance you will notice something untoward. I'll keep an eye on comments as per usual.

Ta for now!

Fandom: Tolkien: Lord of the Rings
Characters/Pairing/Other Subject: Legolas
Content Notes/Warnings: none
Medium: traditional art (watercolours)
Artist on DW/LJ: n/a
Artist Website/Gallery: mikhalson on tumblr
Why this piece is awesome: A lovely watercolour of Legolas in the woods. I like the delicate colours, and the second photo with the beam of light really brings out the forest around him.
Link: Forest prince in the cradle of his kingdom

DW is seeing some issues due to today's Amazon outage. For right now it looks like the site is loading, but it may be slow. Some of our processes like notifications and journal search don't appear to be running and can't be started due to rate limiting or capacity issues. DW could go down later if Amazon isn't able to improve things soon, but our services should return to normal when Amazon has cleared up the outage.

Edit: all services are running as of 16:12 CDT, but there is definitely still a backlog of notifications to get through.

Edit 2: and at 18:20 CDT everything's been running normally for about the last hour.

Fandom: Tolkien: Lord of the Rings
Characters/Pairing/Other Subject: Osgiliath
Content Notes/Warnings: none
Medium: traditional art (watercolour)
Artist on DW/LJ: n/a
Artist Website/Gallery: Matěj Čadil's own website, Matěj Čadil on DA
Why this piece is awesome: An intricate watercolour with delicate colours and lots of great detail - I love worldbuilding and this recreates Gondor's old capital, which was in ruins by LotR times. I love the contrast between this beautiful, spacious city on the river Anduin, compared to Minas Tirith which was very much a fortress (as it needed to be).
Link: Osgiliath the pic on a Tolkien wiki.

Fandom: Star Trek: Discovery
Characters/Pairing/Other Subject: Keyla Detmer & Joann Owosekun
Content Notes/Warnings: Star Wars Fusion, i.e. Keyla and Joann as Jedis
Medium: digital art
Artist on DW/LJ: laughingpineapple
Artist Website/Gallery: https://archiveofourown.org/users/laughingpineapple/profile

Why this piece is awesome: Really fun art style! I love their back-to-back fighting poses, the warm colour palette, and the design choices for their clothes and hair.

Link: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29159499

Fandom: Tolkien: Lord of the Rings
Characters/Pairing/Other Subject: Frodo
Content Notes/Warnings: none
Medium: digital art
Artist on DW/LJ: n/a
Artist Website/Gallery: lycazart on tumblr
Why this piece is awesome: This is a rather angsty portrait of Frodo, as is only right. I like the movement, and the emotion in his face.
Link: I wish the ring had never come to me