"Now draw her doing her taxes"
In the 1970s, Phoebe Lexton wasn't quite the household name she became by the 2020s. She was still a pretty fresh daytime TV host, making solid wages but nothing lifestyle-altering. As such, she had to do her own taxes like most people do, and since NitroTax would not be invented for another two decades, she had to do it with pen and paper as well! It's a tedious process, and Phoebe definitely needs to let her thoughts flow freely, so she's donned her tax-doing outfit. This outfit is a very sheek, post-modern combination of her birthday suit and a blue hair tie to keep her poofy blonde hair out of her face while she's working. This is more than Phoebe normally wears at home, which is how you know she's serious! Personal finance is a two-handed job, but this leaves her legs to do whatever feels right at the moment, simple nervous motions like stretching around furniture, or...other methods of relieving stress. It's her custom workflow, honed by years of practice, and in fact, her eyes are stretched out as a kind of advanced technique - by overlaying two numbers using her eyes telescoping towards them, she can quickly and easily compare them visually to make sure they match!
For this one, I wanted to practice placing and scaling characters in a scene, which, um, I don't do often at all haha. If I am to push my art to the next level, I need to understand space and dynamics more, so this will hopefully not be the last time I do a piece like this! Ultimately it was a longer (pun intended) series of challenges to solve than I usually have, but I have some ideas to streamline the process next time! I also wanted to try the really-broad-brush shading borders again, and it still needs work, but this made enough sense that I called it good. One trick I learned from the creepy pic was that outlines should be under the color tint layer, at least when they correlate to the color of the flats beneath them. Ideally the shading should also overlap them, but it's tricky to make that not look bad, so I'll need to figure something out on that side.