Pretending

Original DA Upload Date: February 14, 2020

AUTHOR’S NOTE: Please do not comment on this piece unless you have watched the music video for “Back on the Chain Gang” by the Pretenders. It will answer most of the questions you have regarding this piece.

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Nothing says “Happy Valentine’s Day” like making a joke about your last name by paying homage to a 1980s music video.

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It’s Valentine’s Day again, which means it’s time for another piece featuring Grunvale‘s most prominent canon ship, Margo Hynde x August Lowry. Or, ‘Margust’ for short. I knew I wanted to draw something involving the two again like I did last Valentine’s Day, and when I ended up drawing Margo Hynde as Chrissie Hynde (shut up! it’s funny and you know it), I pretty much just went from there, and decided to make this year’s piece a full-out homage to the 1982 music video for “Back on the Chain Gang”, with August dressed how drummer Martin Chambers appears in the video.

While Margo was traced from pre-existing artwork I’ve drawn of her, August was (mostly) not, as I wanted to see how much I could do using the references only as, well, references. This experiment resulted in him having a pudgy look to his face, and… I honestly don’t know if I like it or not. I’ll have to trace from this and Ready For Their Date, to create a potential middle ground between regular-faced August and pudgy-faced August. I do think there is potential integrating the latter into his design. But if I don’t like the result, I’ll just stick to regular-faced August.

The drawing process went pretty smooth this time around… or at least I thought it did, before I realized, AFTER uploading this to Twitter, that I had used the wrong color outline for much of the suit on August’s asset. Instead of using pure black like I usually do for character outlines, I used the off-black of the suit, which resulted in a lot of unintentional missing outlines. Though I managed to fix them before uploading the piece here (and BlackMoonPaladin didn’t even notice the missing outlines until I pointed them out to him), it’s still pretty embarrassing for me that I let the art be seen in that state.

As you can tell, I decided to place this artwork, which I drew in 4:3, in a 16:9 matte. I did this because I thought the black bars had artistic purpose. Most music videos from the 80s and 90s were shot in 4:3, which, though mostly long abandoned by mainstream cinema by then, was still the standard for television, and by extension, music videos (which, at the time, were mostly shown on MTV). Today, however, 16:9 is the standard, and thus, media in 4:3 appears with black bars on the sides by default. In other words, I have those black bars on the sides to make the artwork look like a snapshot of the past, being viewed in the present. Something of a nostalgia filter.

Anyhoo, that’s all for this one. Happy Valentine’s Day!

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Grunvale – Chapter 11, Part 3: 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.
“Back on the Chain Gang” was written by Chrissie Hynde for the album Learning to Crawl, owned by Warner Music Group.
This artwork was made at 4K resolution, in 1.33:1. However, it is matted to 1.78:1 for artistic reasons.

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Don’t worry, August doesn’t mind having to use the pickaxe. That’s why he has that subtle smirk on his face. If he minded, he wouldn’t even have agreed to do this.