Or.
Hark! Once again betrayed by my child-like sense of wonder!
[ Out of topic: Please scroll down to see other some other pictures. I've been enjoying this new Patreon feature to add pictures along the text but I fear that if someone here isn't really interested in my disertations and just wants to see the pictures at the top (valid) they might have been loosing on some stuff]
Long day at the hospital. When they have the time, those three still hang out like they did when they were interns so long ago after their shifts.
Work, gym with her friends, taking a walk and now a snack. She's not even that hungry. She's just making time as she doesn't want to go home. She still hasn't gotten used to how empty that place is since he left
Those two are old friends who just ran into each other after not having seen each other in months by coincidence. They're failing to realize they're basically on a date.
He has been having a terrible couple of months since he got laid off. Still be envious though, as, as soon as he looks up at the girl knocking the glass and asking his order he will have met the love of his life.
As for them, well, those two come from different worlds yet now are best friends. Not everyday you discover your accountant shares the same obscure interest as you.
And the cooks, well, minus one, it's just a regular night.
And we're back. Happy New year! I drew some stuff!
Days end early at small towns and that always catches the people from the city off guard. You feel you have time to get something to eat later and then, Boom! Everything is closed.
But turns out Diego, Lil's old friend from high school, who she hasn't seen in months but just ran into, just happens to be on a field trip with some colleagues from college at the same town the Lil’s band is playing at, and has been there just enough to know the one place that's still open after 10:PM
It's not fancy, but it's clean enough and pretty alright.
I've been thinking about these two a bit for some time, as I already mentioned somewhere.
I really like drawing them but it's not a pleasure that I give myself so often and because of that, minus some occasional flashes of the future, I really haven't played with their dynamic a lot.
And that's because I always feel like keeping stuff to explore in the comics but unfortunately it's moving a bit slow, though I'm always trying to change that, and to be fair last year I did a lot of work in comics. Though half of it was in a different one if you count the vampire thing. My point here is that I don't feel I've gotten to a point where I can get all angsty with it.
Not that it would be too angsty though. Not to spoil things but I like the idea of the band members finding different kinds of love.
For example, the dynamic I've probably played with the most is Zara and RJ who, aside from their enjoyment of keeping secrets, have what I like to think of as, for the lack of a better term, grown up love. Like a very mature and healthy relationship which with these terms sounds boring but I think is thrilling for both of them as the relationships they had with their most notorious exes, Laura and… was it Freddie? were pretty unstable (and sometimes dangerous).
As for Lil and Diego, well I think they're a couple of sillies.
Speaking of silly, I actually have something for that.
Silly huh?
Funny thing is I was doodling feral Lil and Diego and I came up with two sketches I really liked, so I took one and wanted to try something more experimental with the rendering and it came out alright but I started working on it on a more simple way during a lunch break and I actually liked how it came out more than the other one.
It emphasizes more their silliness. It kinda looks like a title card for a 90s cartoon. Like it gives me a Rita and Runt like vibe or something.
I've mentioned once somewhere that two of my biggest inspirations for Lil are the “Le Chat Noir” poster and the Pink Panter of the intro animation for the very first Pink Panther movie from the 60s (the one where he smokes) and you can see the influences here. And as for Diego. He’s a silly boy and he gets the silly to come out through her introvertedness.
As for the other one that technically took more time. I still like it it's just that the other one works better and it was by accident, kinda, so that makes it a bit more interesting lol.
Through there's not just silliness, it gets a bit complicated when you remember that their relationship is on a “Schrodingery time out” they're not completely aware of. And I get a lot of fun of the idea of them being completely oblivious. Though they have to be aware at some level right…?
Well I'm the author and if I say they don't, they don't and that's final!
Though…
Nah, let's have fun with it. I'm not completely sure on how canon I'm making this dynamic, or more like how I’m gonna use it but I have this.
So these two meet at high school right? And become very good friends and he starts hanging out with Lil and the band for a while.
And I think they still don't know it but these two were pretty much like a week away from making out or something when he got accepted into college to his own surprise. And at his last attempt!
Problem is that his college is kind of far away so it was easier for him to move closer with some friends.
And not only that but this was more or less the time when the band started talking seriously about touring, even though it would take them more time to actually start doing it but see, I think this sealed the deal.
I think deep down Lil and Diego both got intimidated by each other's future.
See. Most of what they knew about the other's “career path” came from TV and movies, so Lil imagined college to be going around, taking books from the library, pranking the dean and having a bunch of parties with drugs and sex while Diego imagined touring to be going around living on a bus, arguing with their agent and having a bunch of parties with drugs and sex.
And it's not that there hasn't been some of that but nah…
In a sense, both were betrayed by each other's sense of child-like wonder.
See, there's tragedy in beauty or something I guess lol
More than intimidated though, they maybe subconsciously feared holding the other back.
But in the last stand, the titular piece of this post, I like to imagine they find each other after months where they did text with each other but they hadn't actually talked for a while.
Lil’s band is gonna play at the aperture of a museum Diego has been working helping at for extra points.
And they get to see that their lives haven't been neither Animal House nor The Dirt.
Though there might be better examples.
And I'm only sharing this because I doodled a silly thing that, while a bit obvious, amused me enough to finish and now post so here it is.
Now if you allow me to play a bit with alt versions and all that. I've been having some fun with the 1:2 aspect ratio of the piece. Discovering that it can be split in not only 2 but three functional compositions that sort of work differently from each other.
The first and obvious one is the one that focuses even more on Diego and Lil. And gives them more importance than the original one where, while still the focus, I wanted to frame them as just other two guys among the crowds. Not necessarily more important than the other people there.
As for the other two, now we have compositions that focus on characters on a low point, and with this being emphasized by them being surrounded by people who, on the other hand, seem to be having a good time.
I wrote a bit on these two back stories at the beginning of the dissertation and while it's not really apparent on the piece itself I like to think it gives the two pieces some sort of symmetry.
As the hyena guy has been in a dark place for a while but it's about to get out of there after falling in love with the elephant lady who's asking for his order.
On the other hand, the cheetah girl who was recently abandoned by her husband and is just now contemplating for how long she's going to be in said dark place.
So he's on the way out and she's on the way in.
She will be happy again eventually, probably, so don't worry too much.
Also, these all are 1:1 so I took the chance and made album cover versions, you know for fun.
Now, as a final fun fact on this issue. Some of you might have noticed already but the sad protagonist of these two alt versions look like Diana could be the result of them making the Dragon Ball fusion dance.
And you might be wondering “What did good old Katnay mean with that?” and the answer is: I don't know, I just noticed... Weird huh…? Also funny…
I realized a bit too late in the process to change it… I mean. I could still change it but, meh…
The literal scenario for this piece is based on a trip I made to Cuernavaca for a convention I went to and I discovered coming out of day one that most businesses were closed which I found weird because in the city they stay open until 12 at least.
So I had to stand in a big line in front of a burger stand a block away from my hotel as it was the only one still open in the area. And to be fair it was worth it because those were some good fucking burgers.
You may notice some Christmas decorations in the background. Good catch. But no this one wasn't thought of as a Christmas piece. I like to think it's more like an early January piece. You know that first 1 or 2 weeks we're still on before taking the lights down unless you're my neighbor and you leave them on until the summer when the rains turn them off by force. (They did that two years in a row)
The stand in question didn't look like the one in the picture though, it was more of a cart and this one is more based on the traditional Mexican Torta stands. Fun fact, Torta means cake in Spanish except in Mexico where it stands for a specific style of sandwich.
It's not completely visible on the side of the stand but if you zoom in enough in one of the menus you'll notice that the stand is named “Las lagartonas” which would mean something like female lizards or Lizard Women in Spanish though it's also slang for easy women or prostitutes but in this case, with the owner of the stand being an alligator, it would have a third meaning like “The lizard ones” as in the tortas being the lizards, or of a lizard. And that's what we call an “albur”. See, it's fun!
I feel like that's totally what a Mexican alligator would name his torta business but I guess we'll never know for real.
Also here's the stand sign.
Another extra picture I made for this one is the soda bottle painted on the side of the fridge. Unfortunately I don't really have a good quality copy of that one which is a shame because a joke that gets lost in the final picture is the bottle having the word diet on the label but the T is not clearly visible so it reads like Die. Though just now while writing this I'm realizing that The Simpsons already made that joke 20 years ago so it doesn't really matter.
And also the picture on the calendar. Nothing too impressive, just a nice beach scene.
Knowing it was gonna be obstructed anyway I originally wanted to have a spicier kind of calendar but unfortunately I came up with some more lore and the story telling forced me to change it for something tamer.
Basically the owner of the stand used to be a wilder guy. The type of guy to name his business a synonym for prostitute and to have an adult magazine calendar in front of it. But eventually he got married and now he's working with his daughters and he's cleaning up his act a bit for them. (Yeah! World Building!)
And lastly the picture on the tv. Originally I was going to draw a news caster there but recently for some reason I decided I didn't want to put the news in this picture so I thought about putting a futbol match there.
But I got bored of that idea quickly. So I thought about turning on the TV at some random moment and see what was on, and to no one's surprise I catched a commercial break. Though not really the same ad I ended up drawing in the end.
It's not completely clear in the end result (Even though I did add the word latex) but it's actually a condom ad. And you may be asking “Geez Katy, what did you mean by that? What were you trying to say?”
And my answer is: never call me Kathy again! And also; nothing really, I was just being a little naughty, Teehee hee”
Also, I found a brush in procreate I really liked and in this post and some others you can see I've been having a lot of fun with it lately lol
Happy New Year!