Original DA Upload Date: September 21, 2020
A little celebratory artwork for Earth, Wind & Fire Day (the 21st night of September). Ba-de-yah!
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The 1978 song by Earth, Wind & Fire, “September”, is one of the most recognizable of the entire disco genre, and for good reason. It has a catchy beat, funky instrumentation, and one of the most classic pieces of gibberish ever sung. Is it overplayed? Oh, definitely. But that doesn’t change its status as a fun party song, and one of the signature songs, not only of Earth, Wind & Fire, but of the entire disco genre. It’s right up there with “Dancing Queen”, “Love Train”, “YMCA” and… the entirety of the Bee Gees’ discography, as one of the first songs anyone thinks of when they think ‘disco’.
So of course, as a fan of 1970s music whose mascot character is a fan of 1970s music, I just had to draw something disco-themed to celebrate the 21st night of September of 2020. COVID may have cancelled a lot of things this year, but it will never cancel the public’s love for disco music! Although actually having a disco party right now is not a good idea, especially if your country is run by a gross orange moldy thing that’s killed over 200K of its own people with its negligence.
Now to the piece!
Someone on Twitter brought up that they like character designs where everyone in a group wears the same outfit, but in different colors to show their individualism. And the examples they brought up were the Powerpuff Girls, the Winx club, and the Mane Six. The latter one I found a bit of a stretch considering that they don’t normally wear clothes (except Applejack and her hat), but that did spark an idea in my head: that the Oddball Tetrad, on certain outings as a group, would often like to dress in outfits that matched in design but not in color. Like dancing at a party! As a group!
Initially, I combined all of the Tetrad into one layer. But then I realized that wouldn’t make sense from a three-dimensional perspective. So I used backup assets of them (I always make backup duplicates, just in case I screw up), overlaid a black solid over each individual asset, and then gave each of the Tetrad their own red glow. The real challenge, however, was the duplication effect, a reference to the original “September” music video. The music video used a chroma key effect to layer several frames on top of one another, creating a trippy effect that… I wish there were more videos using, honestly. The only other music video I can think of with a similar effect, is “WTF?” by OK Go.
Because the music video used black for its chroma key, I knew the background for this piece had to be black. I initially tried using a mask for the wooden floor, but my dumb brain forgot that masks create transparency, and thus would expose the floor duplicate underneath. So I just overlaid a black gradient that’d fade into the black background. The rest was just a matter of letting the homage to the original effect create the background. Each asset (everything not the black background or my signature was eventually combined into one) is 5% smaller than the one in front of it, to the point where the one furthest to the back is half the size of the original. I could’ve done more, but I didn’t want ASP to crash and erase my progress on the layers. So I kept it to ten.
Anyhoo, that’s all for this one. Happy 21st night of September!
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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 a resolution of 5076×2160 (aspect ratio 2.35:1).
The Gallery of Stormy Adler 