the unEllery

OK, since I seem to have almost totally flaked out on art these last few days, and I can’t seem to think what to render today, I dug this out to post instead.

This is from November of 2012. I’d been doing art and comics with Ellery Petrezza, among other characters, for six months, off and on (mostly off). Ellery had quickly become kind of a star of the comic strip in my mind. And her tomboy attitude was a major, defining part of her character.

I think a big reason I started playing around with an Ellery ‘inversion’ was her arms. Ellery’s arms are shorter—actually smaller overall, relative to her torso—than the standard for a Victoria 4 / Stephanie 4 figure; and I kept worrying that I’d made her arms too short, and that that would cause problems. (I think Ellery’s arms have worked out OK, but I used to worry about it a lot.)

So as a joke I made a version that used her basic design—for example, her face is the same under the makeup—but with certain design elements dropped or even reversed: the unEllery.

I composed this image, but I left it not quite finished; I wanted to fix a couple of very minor things in Photoshop. But it was a private joke that might not even make sense to other people, and not that important. So I didn’t go back and ‘finish’ it until today.