elijahpink
Office Lady BTS
Published: July 11th 2019, 4:47:22 pm
PICS + WIP HERE
NOTICE: All the pictures in this link are of consenting adults performing in role play scenarios.
Scenes such as the ones portrayed herein should always be safe, sane and consensual. And fun for everyone involved! 
As I said in the original post, this pic was inspired by Shigeru Suzuki's album Lagoon , specifically the track Tokyo Harbor Line. I don't speak japanese at all, so I have no idea what the lyrics are, except for the one part where he sings 'office lady' :D
But in general it just gives me a really chill nice feel of summer. So I wanted to do a pic that had a bit of that feel and was about an office lady ;)
My first sketch was like this:
I really hadn't intended to do much of a background, really. Just the Office Lady on her chair, a bit of a desk, and I had an idea that the window would be just like a hole in the pic with bright blue sea, sky and a city from high above.
But as I'd done this sketch, I realized I had to have a viewpoint that was more pointing down so you'd see more out the window.
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So I drew a new pose for her, more from above. The crossed legs felt like a must for that office feel :) It felt a little too realistically proportioned, though. In my head I wanted to do something that felt a little more cartoony and cute. But it worked as a base.
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So the sketching started for real!
And my idea for just a lady and barely any background went out the window ( ;) ) as I started drawing the office. It was just too fun to draw! The song that inspired it is from '79, so I figured that late 70s-early 80s feel would be fun.
As you can see, the Office Lady herself looked very different! I really liked her face here, but it still didn't feel right. It wasn't what I'd had in mind. She was very... coy and amused and sultry I guess. And in my head I wanted a more excited anticipation feel.
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So I went with this instead! More wide eyed, and cuter. Also the gag got a lot bigger, too ;)
This design is a bit more "usual" for me, I guess. The other one has a hair style that I don't usually draw very often. I'm sure some of you prefer the old design, but c'est la vie. <:) Maybe they're co-workers and can meet in the future hehe
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Anyway, off to the line art!
As I was working on the lines, I started thinking that maybe I wanted more contrast between the airy feeling of outside and her office. Make the office more cramped. That feeling of a room that's barely bigger than a broom closet, but has a huge window. It was a cozy idea! So I framed the whole thing with plants, because any office feels nicer with a bunch of plants, too!
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Then it became time to color. Something that I'm, as I say in basically every post here, am kind of scared of because of the flatting part. I usually have kind of an idea in my head and I start filling in colors one thing in the picture at a time, until it's all color. And I'm usually really sceptic to the entire picture while I do it.
With this one I wanted to change that and just decide on everything before I start the actual flatting, to alleviate all that stress and nervousness. So I did a bunch of color sketches.
The 2nd one form the left here, I think could've worked really well. But it felt a bit too underwater-y haha
My initial idea for the picture as I was doing lines was probably something like the 4th from the left - with the dark-ish office and the brigh outside. But in that one, most of the light and feel of the pic came from the fact that all the light had a strong orange "halo"-ish effect. And I had an idea that I wanted most of the picture to be just flat color, and a strong highlight from the window. Which is why I settled on the 6th one here. I found it fun to almost take away all the detail and color in the highlight - really overexpose it - and in that way connect her more with the outside.
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Because I'd done the test colors, I was pretty confident when doing flats! Which felt GREAT! :D I could just sample colors from the sketch and fill. And I'd done very clean lines to make this process even easier (also pretty unsual for me). Because some of the sketch coloring was really... sketchy, though, I chose to do some of the flats in gradients too, working in more bright oranges in places where there was more light.
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Then I worked in the strong highlight and orange glows around the highlight too.
This was just a copied layer of the flat colors that I'd increased the saturation and lightness on.
(Skip this next part if you don't want to read some slightly technical stuff or if you already know about flatting lol)
You can see how the pic looks without lines here - with all the white stuff showing. This is because the picture is badly flat colored! Usually with flat color you want each color "field" to line up with eatch other and the lines to be riiiight in the middle of them. Because when the picture is printed, if something gets misaligned (that is if you print offset - with each color channel printed separately on top of each other) you don't want these white bits to show through. It's called 'flashing' and looks awful. Of course, this doesn't matter much when it's just a digital pic - but doing proper flat colors is a good habit to keep anyway, Just in case! I dont keep that habit haha
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Of course to get a real nice glowing feel in the light - you can't have a bunch of black, unsaturated lines dragging it all down! Also, I wanted to try the look of having the outlines of each thing in black with the lines inside being colored. It's a look I was totally inspired to do by various artists I follow. :) Anyway, so I did all the stuff that were in light in bright oranges.
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And this is how they look together!
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After that I just added some extra little effects, like blurred edges and some motion lines, to just give the pic a little extra life and motion. And that's it!
Thanks for making it to the end! :)
And thanks, as always for being a part of this patron and letting me get a chance to do this! You're the best!
Oh yeah, here's just the Lady, in a .png with a transparent background. So she can be pasted and posted anywhere haha :D
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