<<< PREV | FIRST | NEXT >>>
Oh, I see now why Sherryl is reluctant to get her new shoes wet. That should be self-explanatory, but she has an extra motivation in the form of what she paid for those. And the leather bottom, but mostly the price. This figure and the time she "took" looking for them is based on my research at the time for a suitable pair to draw on her. Sherry's favorite color, if you haven't guessed by now is a pastel shade sometimes referred to as "powder blue".

Back when I devised the dialogue for this sequence, ballet flats were just becoming popular but had yet to spawn a blizzard of styles and colors the way any popular women's style would. Turning to the largest online shoe store, Zappos.com, I hit up their listings for ballet flats and came up with around 1200 matches. I wound up scrolling through almost all of those thumbnails before coming up with the style Sherryl is shown wearing, "Pearl" by French Sole NY, which according to Zappos' site is a fairly upscale boutique brand. The company is still around as I write this in 2021 although the 'Pearl' is long discontinued, and the closest match in their lineup ("Jigsaw") is $200 :D

Given the length of the search, I decided that Sherryl would momentarily take leave of her practical side and splurge on these, which while not quite a match to her fave shade of blue, were at least blue and shiny. Clearly, had she known the rain was so close, she would have insisted on changing shoes before letting Tina drag her off on a shopping expedition. Not to fear, Tina is quite experienced in picking out footwear that laughs at the rain, the puddles, and other things that go along with those...

Technical:

While the inks for these pages were done in 2019, I found that, upon returning to the project that there were a lot of things in the linework that needed to be corrected. Most were irregularities in the linework, say two lines that were to intersect but didn't quite do so, and others that went behind the monochrome silhouettes that originally went under the inked characters to separate them from the backdrop lineart behind them. Once the inks layers were merged, those flat silhouettes did nothing to hide those lines, which had to be meticulously erased from within the characters' outlines. Oh, and despite all that, I found that not all of the shoeboxes and the racks that held them, were drawn in when I last wandered away from the project.

Right before I pronounced this one finished, I had a good look at the closeup of Sherryl's shoes, and compared to the photographic insert in the previous panel, they were lacking. Originally I had made an car-door-style highlight across the side of the shoe, rising and falling with the contour of the side of the shoe. As a last-minute decision I blanked out all of those and re-drew them as solid blocks of translucent light and dark variants of the base color, with a thin line of light source swooping across the edge of the shadows, a reflection of the floor color right above the soles, and a reflection of Sherryl's right leg across the heel of the left shoe.

Pencil on bristol inked and colored in Clip Studio Paint EX. 27 layers including text + balloons. 18MB .CLIP file. Part of project ID# 451. (Pg#92)

<<< PREV | FIRST | NEXT >>>