Shoppin’ Around

Original DA upload date: August 24, 2019

Gilda and April are out on a shopping trip the mall, and the procyonine geek, at her friend’s suggestion, has bought herself a pair of white gloves, which she has instantly fell in love with.

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April Lowry doesn’t just like wearing gloves to make a feminine fashion statement. She also wears them because of her OCD; she hates getting her hands dirty. But only August knows this. When anyone else asks her, the only reason she gives is ”cause dey’re pretteh, a’right?’ or something similar.

As for Gilda Grime, considering her personality as a retro geek, and also, to quote The Narrator, ‘gloves been out of mainstream, non-winter fashion for like 50 years, unless you’re a cartoon character or Michael Jackson‘, I also see her as the kind of individual who’d wear gloves on (formal) occasion (which, to be fair, she does). In fact, Gilda herself has a design deeply rooted in classic/retro cartoons. Her outfit is inspired by that of characters such as Little Audrey (the character on which Audrey from Harvey Street Kids is based) and Luan Loud (who comes from a franchise inspired by comic strips from yesteryear), and Grunvale‘s art style is inspired by Sonic the Hedgehog, which itself is inspired by that of the 1930s Mickey Mouse cartoons. Not to mention that Gilda’s Fleischer-style counterpart, ‘Li’l Gilda’, always wears white four-digit gloves, in keeping with the cliches of cartoons of the era. With all that in mind, I don’t think the regular, ZP-51498 Gilda would mind wearing gloves at all.

Anyhoo, back to the subject matter, this is supposed to be set shortly after April gives Gilda that yellow dress. April originally made the dress for herself to wear, but when she found that it didn’t fit her, she planned to throw it out. She had a change of heart, however, when she found that the dress fit Gilda perfectly. The way I pictured this work, this shopping trip was to buy accessories to wear with their outfits. Those white gloves are the same gloves Gilda wears with her dress.

Now to the art itself… and boy is there a story behind it.

While I didn’t have any serious mishaps on my part like with Kyle’s birthday present, it was ASP itself that was giving me issues this time. ArtStudio Pro does tend to crash on me when I do certain complex things with it, like inpainting or a massive (100px+) blur, but those are usually by accident, and only happens once during the drawing process, if at all. This time though, the app crashed… I’d like to say five times. Five times! As I was just doing what I normally do! If I had to guess, I’d say that it was the background that was giving me issues. It’s got skewing and gradients going on with the walls, beveling with the bush, the flowers were created by making a bunch of thick strokes with a generated stroke effect… there’s a lot of complex stuff going on in the background, is what I’m trying to say. If that was what overloaded the app, I wouldn’t be surprised.

But even with all the issues it caused me… I’m proud of how it turned out. It even inspired me to draw a few experiments in ASP, to see how far I could push the 3D illusion using only the tools present in the app. You’ll… be seeing those here in the next few days.

And that’s all for this one. Post in the comments below what you think of this!

…hey, what’s that graffiti on the wall?

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Grunvale – Chapter 11, Part 2: Now Available on DA!

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Grunvale is owned by me. You’re free to draw fanart of it yourself, as long as you credit me.
This artwork was made at 4K resolution, in 2.35:1.

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To add to that paragraph about Gilda’s retro inspirations, her retro geek personality is inspired by how I was in my youth, and still am today, albeit to a somewhat lesser extent. I still love retro music and retro video games just like Gilda, but as a teenager, I wanted to look retro too, just as Gilda does Grunvale. I even grew out long, 60s/70s style sideburns, like those of Ray Dorset and Joe Cocker. I thought they looked cool then. I know better now.