Well here's some art I wasn't planning on making at all But a few days ago when the Stupid Powers Challenge appeared in my notifications over on deviantArt, I knew I had to do it for the badge.
After many cycles through the generator that I wasn't happy with (many I thought were amusing but I had no desire to draw them), I'd almost settled on a different headline than this one, but I decided to give it a go a few more times the next day, just to see if something I liked better popped up. And I'm glad I did because that time the headline I've illustrated here came up: Librarian Embarrasses Themselves on Livestream With Ability to Pet Every Cat They See
I had the idea right away of a poor mousy librarian girl having fallen down with books everywhere, and kitty cats thoroughly enjoying her "power." And then after I started sketching I had the idea to add the Youtube video frame since the headline does say this happened during a Livestream. (And a disclaimer that I know the frame isn't 100% accurate; I only had a couple of livestreams I was actually willing to have in my Youtube watch history to choose from and they weren't quite exactly what I needed so I had to make some extra manual modifications.)
Here's my logic; This girl is a popular Librarian Youtuber (let's pretend that's a thing that exists) and she was just doing a routine "I'm going to Livestream while I reshelve books so you guys can see the library and my process" when, somehow or another, a couple of cats got into the library while she was up on a ladder doing the reshelving, she saw them, and the next thing she knew...She was on the floor with the cats and many, many books around her.
I also went with a slightly different process from my usual (as is maybe obvious) in order to get this done as quickly as possible, but still with a level of quality that I was comfortable with.
I sketched as usual until I thought the girl and the cats were refined enough that I could do the linework without much guesswork (which involved taking some reference pictures of myself and a doll to get the right angle of the book and glasses). Then I scanned it into Photoshop and did the lines more or less as usual.
When I moved on to the coloring, I decided to do some more simplified cell shading similar to what I did for I will be with You. It's not quite the same, as this one has linework and that one was lineless, but I think it works well enough.
And I did briefly try to use only the colors from the #stupidpowers journal & generator, but in the end, it just wasn't working for me because of the details I had in mind. So I ended up using a more natural color for her skin and blonde for the hair (I was just in a blonde mood at the time), but otherwise, I did try to stick with the original palette. I did have to add a cream color for the book pages and her name tag, though.
After that, I went out of my way to avoid having to draw in a background of many books. Not after how long it took me to do the background for World in a Book, and that was far fewer books in a much more organized manner. Originally, I'd considered actually just grabbing the shelves or part of them from that drawing, but after I had the Youtube frame and the girl and cats finished, that sounded less like a good idea, style-wise, and that wouldn't account for the mess of books there needed to be.
So I went and grabbed a few different stock photos from PixaBay and edited them together, making adjustments until I was happy with how it looked.
After that, the last step was to add a drop shadow to the girl and the cats so they'd pop against the background a little more since it felt like they were blending in a bit.
I don't think this cartoon-character-on-a-real-background look will become a norm for me, but I think it works well enough in this instance.
This also isn't my greatest, portfolio-worthy art, but I am pretty happy with how it turned out, all things considered.
And with that, onward with the other art things I was working on before this got added to my regimen!
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Artwork © me, MysticSparkleWings
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