[ (08/23/2024) Number 75 in the 'over 2000 views club']

So, I was made aware of  Kritterfox's birthday a couple of days prior by  Ghostfox91, and just by coincidence, I had been reminded not long before of the sequence from the Emperor's New Groove, where chief antagonist Yzma commands her sidekick Kronk to open the entrance to their "secret lab" by pulling the tusk of a statue mounted on a wall. We all know how that ends up. But with this fresh in my mind, the heads-up spawned an idea, one that I thought I could knock out in a couple of days. But instead of the EnG characters, let's have a couple of cosplayers played by Kritterfox and Tina, and instead of my Yzma stand-in taking a dive into the drink, I'll 'What a Twist" by trap-dooring Kritter into a mudpit :)

Technical:
The chief reason I undertook this on short notice, beyond the obvious sight gag coinciding with Kritter's b'day is:
--No need to draw a backdrop: For authenticity's sake I could use a screenshot of the scene.
--No need for lighting effects: The original featured flat-shaded characters.
--Minimal editing: just the lever and opening up a trapdoor directly in front of the statue (which came out way better than expected)
--No need to design outfits or pick colors: The participants are cosplaying animated movie characters.

Both poses of Tina and Kritter were penciled on a separate document then inserted atop the screenshot for inking and color once the positioning was worked out. This let me adjust the size of the penciled characters to fit the panels and the resultant fuzziness would not appear once I inked over them at final size. The final size or the working image was not known till I completed the panels, ultimately maxing out at 5200 pixels, which in order to maintain some smoothness in the final upload, will require the 'replace file' hack since after I determined that keeping the length at 1280 would degrade the resolution more than I'd deem acceptable.

Color selection of the costumes was achieved by sampling colors from Yzma and Kronk in the original clip. For our characters, I started with their canonical colors and darkened them (with a bias toward the overall tint of the room) till they fit the scene without popping out of their clothes. While this does give the overall pic a decidedly dark cast, it also made the characters fit into the scene as if they were a frame from the actual animation.

For the "alternate trapdoor" I traced a selection mask over the large floor stone in the center of the scene and flood-filled it with the darkest shadow color in the screenshot, then painted in the sides of the stone floor and wall, making it look as if the "wrong" stone opened up in the original clip.

Just before completing the pic, I re-drew Tina's right arm to place her hand on her thigh, originally it was tucked behind her back, but it tended to blend in with the rest of her dress and looked cut off, so there's that. Clip Studio Paint doesn't have a project timer like Krita (as far as I know), so I don't have a figure for how much actual time was spent on this, but the bulk of the work was done the previous Sunday 2/7 and this past Saturday 2/13. So I guess I need at least two weekends prior to an event to produce a single-page pic related to it. Hopefully I'll remember that at various times this year :D

Digital drawings over screenshots, processed in Clip Studio Paint EX. 38 layers including text/word balloon objects (each panel was its own group of layers--sketch, inks, flats, background). 38MB .CLIP file. Project ID# 489.

Oh, and Happy-Another-Lap-Around-The Big-Burning-Ball-of-Gas, Kritter :)