Original DA Upload Dates:
- Sunday Worst – May 9, 2021
- You May Now Kiss Any Hope For The Wedding Goodbye – May 12, 2021
- Gilda’s Birthday, or: Balance in the Party World – May 14, 2021
- Hynde Triplets’ Birthday, or: Cio Che Va, Torna – June 23, 2021
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And now for the Ricky’s Wedding arc, presented in its entirety for the first time on the internet!
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“Sunday Worst” is just another piece of artwork inspired by my sessions of playing Animal Crossing: New Horizons. On April 30th, I dressed up my avatar character (who my followers would know is modeled after Margo Hynde) in an old-fashioned looking green outfit, to prepare for the birthday of one of my villagers, Clyde, the following day. And then I took this screenshot of it and posted it to Twitter. Because of how hilariously out-of-character it is for Margo to dress like this, I thought to myself how funny it’d look to have her wearing this outfit. So I did, and this artwork was born. Pffft!
While the ACNH context is that my avatar character was dressed like this for Clyde’s birthday (birthday parties are treated as formal occasions by the villagers in the game, like weddings and New Year’s parties), the Grunvale context is that the Hyndes are headed to the wedding of Margo’s cousin and Richard Ketcham Jr. and Ivy Snowfield-Ketcham’s son, Richard Ketcham III, aka Ricky Ketcham. And Margo is shocked and disgusted that this goofy-looking ensemble is what she has to wear to the wedding. To her, it’s more like something Gilda would wear, or even her own sister Molly, who has a similar-looking purple outfit.
The blurred green things boxing off the image are supposed to be plants that are in the foreground and out-of-focus. It’s just a bunch of blurred green lines. I think they frame the image pretty well.
I’ve got three other artworks that are set in this same continuity. I’ve said all that needs to be for “Sunday Worst”. So let’s move on to part II, “You May Now Kiss Any Hope For The Wedding Goodbye“!
Richard Ketcham has been established as a stern father figure, but I don’t think I’ve made it clear that his personality was likely born out of rebellion against his father Charles. Even as a child, he’s considered him to be irresponsible as a father, with how much he drank and partied and embarrassed him with his attempts to seem relevant and cool to the youth, even during important events in his life (for example, telling the story of that crazy thing he did on D-Day at his wedding).
Richard is a minority in his family. His siblings have and had a carefree, not-to-serious view on life, his wife Joan does, most of his children do, and most of his grandchildren (Molly being a debatable exception) do too. The carefree lifestyle is also a majority among his nephews and nieces and… grandnephews and grandnieces. His serious demeanor and lack of ever being in a party mood is a recessive trait.
Speaking of having a serious demeanor and being embarrassed by family, those traits ended up rubbing off on Richard’s youngest child and only daughter, Sally Ketcham, known for the past 14 years as Sally Hynde after marrying the musician Harry… who she considers to have the mentality of a child, as she does his famous father Angus. She’s also not proud of how her children, particularly Margo, are turning out. After 11 years of raising them, she basically knows when they’re gonna do something that’ll embarrass her. Like now, when the Hynde family is in Sally’s hometown of Boarston, Massachusetts for the wedding of Richard Ketcham III. Margo complaining about her dress, already taking to social to complain about having to spend the day at a wedding, Molly teasing Margo about having to wear a dress and the latter tattling about it, it’s all building up to an explosion of embarrassment, and Sally is not ready for it. But it’s gonna happen whether she likes it or not.
Now to the piece!
Aside from the sunlight on the asphalt looking like a giant piss stain, the scenery I feel is one of my better attempts. A lot of detail went into drawing the tree closest to the Hyndes, but sadly, Molly and Margo are obscuring a lot of the detail. The trees in the far background I think came out well, though.
And of course, Sally once again looks amazing in mid-20th-century-style attire. I’ve been pushing her as a character to appeal to furries lately, and… well, maybe I should rewrite her character to have a second job as a model. I’ve long loved the idea of her being an injury lawyer (and she still is), but I think it’d be funny if there was a running gag of Sally’s law services being advertised with… fan-service, and characters who have been injured hiring Sally as their lawyer based on the ads they’ve seen of her.
Anyhoo, that’ll be all for part II. Now let’s talk part III, “Gilda’s Birthday, or: Balance in the Party World“!
Did I mention before that Gilda and Margo are rivals as well as friends? Well, this artwork is meant to illustrate that. Story time! Well, the in-universe story, regarding these two rivals’ views of the whole thing.
Margo has been in a bad mood lately due to her having to miss Gilda’s birthday party for the wedding of her cousin, Richard “Ricky” Ketcham III, and his bride, Iris Vandergras, in Boarston. Her attempt to justify missing the wedding by saying she doesn’t know Ricky as well as Gilda failed, with her mother Sally saying that it’s a family obligation to attend the wedding. When Gilda got news that Margo couldn’t attend, she decided to invite Wendy’s sister, Nicole, in her place, reasoning that she has gotten along well with Nicole before, and because she thinks Nicole, being a tomboy, would bring a similar vibe to the party that Margo could have brought.
At the reception for the wedding, Margo, bored by the ceremony and the entertainment at the reception (for instance, the song for Ricky and Iris’ dance being “Wonderwall” by Oasis, a song that Margo hates with a passion), gets her hopes up when she sees that apple cider is being served. Unfortunately for her, the cider was hard cider. Like alcoholic cider. And she ends up getting drunk from it, so drunk in fact that she ends up vomiting… on Iris. In front of the entire Ketcham and Vandergras families. Yeah, because that’s a good impression for a bride to have of her new husband’s family. Getting vomited on by the rowdiest of the bunch. Oh well. At least Charles got a kick out of the spectacle… even if the rest of his family is horrified, with his granddaughter Sally in particular now being too embarrassed to show her face after witnessing what her daughter did in front of dozens of others.
Margo’s drunkenness was recorded by… well, I pictured it as Molly, and was uploaded to social media, where it went viral. 180 miles away back in Grunvale, at Gilda’s party, Nicole has seen the video. She already gave her an actual gift (an LP of True Stories by the Talking Heads… whose lead singer is the aforementioned May 14th birth David Byrne!), but as an additional gift, knowing that Gilda and Margo take delight in watching each other do stupid things, she decided to show the video to Gilda, who, as expected, took great delight in watching it. When Ricky’s wedding got ruined, the birthday party got even more fun and made up for Margo’s absence. Thus bringing balance to the party world.
BTW, that hand-shaking thing is how Gilda stims. She usually does it when she’s laughing or excited.
The top layer took a long time, with all the characters that needed to be drawn. Aside from Margo, Iris and Ricky in the foreground, the background has, from left to right: Sally Hynde (face obscured by her hat out of embarrassment), Shaun Ketcham, Roxanne Sumner, Charles Ketcham, Richard Ketcham Sr., Irene Vandergras (Iris’ sister; they’re from a set of quadruplets), Richard Ketcham Jr., Ivy Snowfield-Ketcham, and Ricky’s twin sister Orchid Snowfield. Most of which make their first appearance in that panel, with this being Charles and Richard Sr.’s first appearance outside of photos in the background. The lighting in that panel was done with a mixture of threshold effects, masking and gaussian blurring. The crowd beyond who we clearly see are just a bunch of blobs, the front one of which (second layer of crowd in general) had blurred colors clipped onto it. To give the feel that this was a video being viewed online, I put a black gradient over the bottom of the panel, and a red scrubber bearing my logo. How was the video recorded in 2.35:1 when phones can usually only record in the aspect ratio they display in? Shut up, that’s how.
That was all I was going to make for this arc… until I decided to make a follow-up, because, if Toy Story is any indication, quadrilogies (the actual word is tetralogies, BTW) are the new trilogies. So now, the description to part IV, “Hynde Triplets’ Birthday, or: Cio Che Va, Torna“! Which also doubles as a 30th anniversary dedication piece to the Sonic the Hedgehog franchise, a major influence on my art style.
As strange as it may sound, my best memories of the franchise are *not* with the first game. Actually, my favorite 2D Sonic game is Sonic the Hedgehog 2, and my favorite of the 3D games is Heroes. Of course I know that the first Sonic is the signature game of the Sega Genesis. That doesn’t mean it’s a flawless masterpiece. In fact, it’s actually quite a bit flawed. Sure, it’s fun to run around Green Hill Zone, but over half of the rest of the game is slow platforming. Which is ironic considering the game is called Sonic the Hedgehog. You’d think a game that has speed as its main selling point, on a console that had processing speed as an advantage over the SNES, would try to build the entire game around speed. But no, only a handful of levels do, and the rest of the game is slow platforming. It’s especially a nightmare going for all six Chaos Emeralds, since you only get 12 chances every run, and only if you bring 50 rings with you to the end of the first two acts of every zone.
Sonic 2, on the other hand, does not have these issues. You have ample opportunity to get all the chaos emeralds (if you bring 50 rings to a checkpoint), and almost every level is made with speed in mind. It only slows down toward the end, with the Sky Chase Zone (an autoscroller) and the Death Egg Zone (two bosses that must be defeated on one hit point). It feels like the game the first one was trying to be, and it’s always the Sonic game I gravitate towards. Yeah, I know Sonic 3 & Knuckles is the one society considers the best, but you know what? I’m not society, I’m a singular person, and as a singular person, I say Sonic 2 is the best of the Genesis titles, and the best 2D Sonic game I’ve played.
I have not played Sonic Mania at the time of me writing this.
Now to the piece!
More elements from the graphic novel transcript are making their way into my artwork. I’ve decided that, for the graphic novel, the Hyndes live in a mansion, instead of just a nice house in the Malick Park neighborhood. The above-ground portion is three floors tall, and has pillars and shrubs designed and arranged to resemble carrots. And the ‘basement’ has a maze-like layout with no clearly defined levels, and is modeled after a warren. The latter of which, of course, is where this artwork takes place. As for dialogue, that’s another thing the graphic novel transcript is influencing. I decided a while back that it’d be cute for Gilda to drop a few Italian words into her speech, to differentiate her dialogue from other characters. I have her saying ‘perfezione’ (the Italian word for ‘perfection’) in the transcript for OTOG, and now I’m having this newly-thought-up trait of hers making an appearance here, with her saying the Italian words for ‘bullshit’ and ‘bitch’.
The ‘zip glitches’ that are being referred to here, are in Marble Zone. Both Act 2 and 3 have well-known ‘zip glitches’ that basically teleport Sonic to the end of the stage, which are used by the speedrunning community at top level. I’ve attempted these glitches before, specifically the Act 2 one, but I only ever end up glitching through the floor and losing a life.
I know how and where I’m gonna introduce all the characters shown here in the graphic novel, except for Scarlett, who I honestly only drew here because Paddy’s here, and I’ve established them as being in a boyfriend/girlfriend relationship before. I’ll figure something out. It may be in a sequel since she only has a third-hand connection to the Tetrad, but I’ll figure out how and when she should be introduced.
Anyhoo, that’s all for this arc. Hopefully my essay on it wasn’t too long for you, heheheh.
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Grunvale is owned by me. You’re free to draw fanart of it, as long as you link me to it.
Part I was made at a resolution of 3996×2160 (aspect ratio 1.85:1); parts II-IV were made at a resolution of 5076×2160 (aspect ratio 2.35:1).
The Gallery of Stormy Adler 