[ (10/31/2024) Number 29 in the 'over 3000 views club']
[Number 27 in the 'over 2000 views club']

Commission for  backlash, this pic takes place in the moment that Jake Ryan finds out that Konani, with whom he was in the midst of an informal get-together induced by mutual flirting, is actually a dude. Now, Konani (who is bisexual) does not actually have a romantic interest in Jake, but went along with the invitation for giggles. He's endlessly amused by his ability to pass for the opposite sex. The discomfort that ensues when he reveals the spoiler is just icing on the cake.

So what happens next? Presumably he's going to whisper in Jake's ear that since nobody else in the diner is aware of what's going on, it's in his best interest not to freak out, something that's gotta be difficult for Jake to manage now that he knows Konani is a he, who's leaning in, hand on Jake's shoulder and playing footsie with him. This is going to be an awkward evening :D

Technical:
This pic started with a little informal back and forth over Discord setting up this premise for a future pic, which gave me the idea of having Jake exhibiting a sort of Wile E. Coyote wide-eyed expression at the moment of revelation, which manifested itself as a rough sketch of the above scene (it...took a few weeks 9_9). But once I had the premise and pose down, I progressed through a refined pencils stage that made use of an altered workflow that saved substantial amounts of time.

Admittedly, when I do real-media pencil drawings, I spend way too much time cleaning them up to the point where they almost don't need ink (see my "weekly ink and pencil" folder). I would also do this with my early digital drawings as well, until I adopted a technique I saw  kinojaggernov employ during her streams working on the webcomic The Depths (nsfw). That being, instead of extensively cleaning and redrawing the initial sketchwork, another layer would be created over these and the working pencils would be drawn over the sketch, using them as a guideline. This produces a cleaner pencil image that can be accurately inked, and is much faster then what I was doing.

Inks began with the outline of the two characters, filled with a single flat color (another tactic I learned from The Depths) setting them apart from the backdrop and once the rest of the linework was done, allowing me to flatshade them without the backdrop interfering with the flood fills. This pic marks the first time I've inked using Krita's brush stabilizer (a feature SAI is well known for) and combined with the "ink_tilt_10" brush produced brilliant results. A setback occurred while doing the shading and highlights--somehow I managed to erase all the highlighting I did on Konani and didn't notice since I was working zoomed in on Jake at the time and he was offscreen. I couldn't recover the work since Krita had already saved a backup of the image in its current state. The newest version of Krita (4.2, released about two weeks ago) lets you set multiple versions of these backups, but I had not upgraded my installation yet. So I wound up having to re-do that work.

Digital sketch/pencil/ink/paint, produced in Krita 4.1.7. 23 layers, 29MB in Krita's native format at original 2550x3300 resolution (876mb in-application). 13 hours actual editing time as per Krita's internal project timer.