This Picture Is Probably Impossible...

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This Picture Is Probably Impossible... by AtonewiththePants

I hope you guys are happy. Creating this one took up so much memory that it crashed my computer and even all the other computers in the neighborhood! 
How is that possible? Because they didn’t close their goddamn windows.

This was one of the newer Dora pictures, drawn and colored last year as a continuation of pictures drawn at least 2 years ago from the day it was started!
The title came from when I showed the pencils with Dora and Diego’s Papi to a friend I’d only known for a few days - hence the friendship. When I showed them this picture, they pointed out that when people laugh they are exhaling but also inhaling, like some kind of "hyperventilating" effect. So the baby’s lungs would be filling with water and it would be, you know, not laughing. I was just about to tell them how ridiculous that theory was when it occurred to me that my sister’s newborn she’d charged me with watching had been awfully quiet since I left him to play in the tub a few hours ago, so I rushed to the bathroom and decided to tell my friend how stupid they were being later. 
But that’s a whole other court date.

This not only being an underwater scene but also one of the more recent pics in the Dora set, I wanted the quality to be noticeably higher than the others pics. I started, of course, with the characters. 

The bodies were a mixed bag. ~Caution: May contain nuts.~
Please keep in mind that all the anatomy you see in this picture is mostly guessed. Despite having done numerous unlicensed medical procedures, witnessing many a-porno and seeing myself naked in the mirror, I hardly knew anything about the human body. (That last thing may or may not have been a contributing factor.) Diego and his Mami’s faces were ridiculous. I kept drawing faces for them, putting this picture down to either go work the docks some more or get a refill on my fluphenazine prescription and coming back later to see what I thought of the lines. Every time I came back I kept finding myself thinking they looked ugly and needed to be redone, which damn well near gave me a fucking heart attack! Do you know how scary it is coming home to see someone who looks exactly like you sitting in your chair and criticizing your work? (Maybe I should switch to clozapine…)

It still feels like I only got the figures you see now by complete accident.

I can’t draw--*stops to slurp Yoo-hoo*--characters on a big canvas especially back then because the size would always slow down the speed of a computer that was already on life support. (Sadly, shortly after finishing this picture, I ended up pulling the plug. Should have watched my step…) To save time and memory, I drew and inked Dora and Diego’s Papi on a regular sized canvas then did Diego and his Mami’s lines on another afterwards coloring both sets in Photoshop with their standard colors - planning on shading them to match the palette of the background when I decided what the fuck that was. Afterwards, I opened up flattened versions of each of the pictures in Illustrator and made the bubbles around the characters on their own separate layers and saved them to their own separate files.
When I’d finished making the bubbles I could tell what was coming next and it scared the shit out of me. 

But I had to do it. 

Working up the courage I slowly and painfully started sizing up a blank Canvas in Photoshop large enough to drop the characters and their bubbles onto. Whenever I stopped scaling to see if I was at the right size I had to save the file - because you never know when the computer will go “oh fuck this!” and forcibly reboot itself before you have time to get a result you‘ll be proud enough to want to save in the first place.
Several forced reboots later, I was “done“ with sizing the document which freed me up to make some finishing touches:
I had added a pier leg because I forgot to explain where they were diving from, pebbles with an ass load of seaweed for window dressing, some shells for those dumb enough to zoom in to full size and a boat because…why not?
With that over, I could finally say I was done with the line art. The hardest part was over, now all I had to do was color in the background! :D

O_O Wait.

I couldn’t color from memory; it had been a long time since I was shown what the bottom of an aquatic setting looked like when my parents--…*stops to take another slurp of Yoo-hoo*…--took me to SeaWorld.
What did you think I was going to say?
Even still, that was a long time ago and I couldn’t make out much of the details through the burlap sack.
So I needed some reference.
First I tried diving underwater at my local beach to get a snap shot of the ocean floor but every time I did that - the cameras shocked me, photos came out blurry and I kept getting harpooned up the ass by whalers who mistook me for a--, um, beautiful mermaid. 
Then I looked into the easy route by trying to Google underwater pictures to use as a background for me to copy and paste the characters onto, but when I did this I couldn’t find what I was looking for and also kept getting harpooned up the ass by those same whalers who again mistook me for a beautiful mermaid…surfing the internet. Yeah.
Gee, what assholes. And you’d think after all these years of working the docks they’d recognize me. 
Hm? No I don’t fish. Why?

When my search for picture reference failed, I tried to get help from another artist on this site who I consider to be my best and closest friend. I approached him and asked if he could color this picture for me because that’s what people who spend so much time together, like us, do for one another. In response he just looked at me blankly then said, and I quote: “Who are you?”
(*Squee* He talked to me!) 
*ahem* That plan wasn’t going to work since it’s hard to work with someone who has a restraining order against you. 
So I finally decided on doing the crazy, batshit, insane and asinine idea of being artistic and actually coloring an ocean floor using my imagination! What could go wrong?
My sister could probably answer that if she was still talking to me, but hey, no response is a good response! 
My nephew seems to agree!

I tried creating a new layer and selecting “Filter/Render/Clouds” then doing “Filter/Artist/Plastic wrap” to make realistic ocean shimmer lines on top of different objects of the picture. I spent weeks trying to figure out how to apply this to the sand without the opacity of the effect layer blocking out the sand underneath if it was set too high, or risk making the white ocean lines of the effect unnoticeable if set too low. At the end of those weeks, I ended up having to make the white surface drop light by tentac--er, hand anyways and only using the plastic wrap effect on the main characters, though you’ll barely notice it underneath all that diving foam. But it doesn’t matter because the experience is its own reward, so it was totally worth it! *Twitch*

Need I remind you that I was doing all of this on a machine that used most of it‘s memory just trying to keep track of the fact that it even had memory. I dreaded closing and having to re-open this document because in the time the TIFF file took to fully load up I could cook an egg and maybe even fry up the chicken that laid it! (That’s what it gets for seducing underage fowls!) The final size for this TIFF file clocked in at about 168 MB. That’s almost as high as my blood-alcohol level! That’s too damn high of a number! (The file size, that is. Personally, my blood-alcohol level can’t be high enough for this line of work.)

Speaking of "lines" and "work", the whalers are back with their harpoons again. I have a job to do and it looks like this one’ll be an all-nighter. Yoo-hoo better pay me now and get out.
:D
© 2015 - 2024 AtonewiththePants
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