Original DA Upload Date: September 15, 2020
I may have decided to reboot Grunvale‘s novel counterpart, but the art will still go as long as I believe in these characters’ potential! And I will always believe in their potential!
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For those that missed the announcement on Twitter, I’ve decided to scrap the version of the Grunvale web novel I was working on. For a while, I felt that the story was going too slow to go anywhere. 200 pages should be well into the story by now, at the 200 page mark of the first version of the story, I barely got into anything. But the tipping point for me, was the recent fires in California, one of which was sparked by a gender reveal party. One of the big scenes that was planned for Grunvale, was the gender reveal party for Sally Hynde’s quints. Had I gotten to that point in the story, it would’ve been one of the big emotional setpieces of the story.
At the party, it would’ve been revealed that Sally had been having an affair with one of the bucks at the law firm at which she works, and thus the quintuplets are not Harry’s biological children. He and Sally would get into a fight in front of all the guests, that would end with Harry finally demanding a divorce, and the triplets worrying whether they’ll end up with their mother or their father.
However, in real life, after learning of the gender reveal party fire and the subsequent backlash against gender reveal parties, I realized my story would be dated right out of the gate. And after giving it some thought… yeah, gender reveal parties are all kinds of disgusting. Not to mention sexist and transphobic. Gender is a spectrum on which one’s place is discovered for themselves, not a binary based on plugs and sockets. And boys can like pink and girls can like blue. Hell, August and Margo are proof of that. In fact, the woman credited with inventing gender reveal parties actually regrets creating them due to all the chaos they caused, and the girl she threw a gender reveal party for, ended up a tomboy. So if the creator of gender reveal parties is begging the world to stop with them, we should really f***ing stop with them.
Anyhoo, due to that change in my worldview, I no longer support gender reveal parties, and no longer wish to have one as part of my story. Sally may be more conservative than most of my other characters, but she’s a female Hank Hill at the very most. She has respect for liberals (albeit not always agreeing with them) and the LGBTQIA community, and would be a supporter of… whatever the Grunvaliverse equivalent of Black Lives Matter would be. Insect Lives Matter, probably. I’ve always imagined insectoid bipedes as the ones that endured systemic racism and police brutality. But by no means would she support someone like George W. Bush, or especially that disgusting, moldy, orange puke stain masquerading as a sentient being. John McCain definitely, and Mitt Romney maybe, but Sally has standards. And among those standards is knowing that gender reveal parties are a stupid and sexist idea better left in the past!
…huh? What’s that? Oh. Right. You want to know about the piece. Okay, let’s talk about the piece.
For a while now, I’ve had an idea in my head, to make an artwork inspired by the Color Graphics Adapter (CGA), released by IBM in 1981. CGA was the original color palette for personal computers, and the predecessor to EGA (Enhanced Graphics Adapter), VGA (Video Graphics Array) and… I don’t know, can HDMI be counted among those? I’m a total noob when it comes to this kind of stuff. Most of what I know about CGA is from this video. But even though the inner workings of computers isn’t my area of expertise, I know from an art perspective that #55FFFF/cyan and #FF55FF/magenta (the two colors most commonly associated with CGA) look aesthetically pleasing together. I mean, why else would the CTRNF version of Electron Avenue (my favorite stage in that game) so proudly show off this pallette?
Anyhoo, when I was drawing the lenses of Gilda’s RayBans (actually, they’re just a gradient I masked out from a duplicated asset of Gilda), I pretty much knew that I had to use a CGA-inspired pallette for this piece. So I did. But why not take it a step further, and draw Margo and her seldom-drawn sister Molly in 80s-inspired outfits?
Margo already has an 80s outfit, thanks to her 80s AU/ZP-51498-198ES counterpart ‘Tabs’. Margo’s 80s outfit/Tabs’ design was and is inspired by hair metal. She’d definitely be the kind of leporine who’d listen to hair metal if she were around in the 80s. I’ve previously drawn Tabs wearing a ‘Carrunchy!’ T-shirt and Margo’s usual navy tee, but here, Margo’s wearing a T-shirt bearing a logo for her grandfather Angus’ band, Myxoma (which is hard to see due to the extreme saturation of the RayBan lenses’ asset). They’re canonically a 1970s and 1980s band, so Gilda would approve of the shirt for the outfit. She is a Myxoma fan herself, after all.
Molly, on the other hand, I decided to draw in a much more over-the-top, stereotypical 80s outfit, inspired by Mabel Pines’ outfits in Double Dipper and Scary-oke. It was just as much fun to draw as it looks. I just wish the colors of her outfit (mostly a dark yellow and light green) were more easy to discern here.
…which is also why I made a black-and-white version of this image. In fact, I actually prefer the black-and-white version of the image, and plan to give it its own separate upload. I feel that it’s so different and has so much to be said about it, that it deserves its own little essay about it. I’ll link to it here when it’s uploaded.
But for now, that’s all for this one. Hope you enjoy the Grunvale reboot when it begins dropping!
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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 