Would you believe this was originally a pencil sketch so old that the half-sheet of fanfold paper it was drawn on was turning yellow? Me neither. But originally this is the headshot sketch originally posted to my scraps a couple of days ago (link). I had intended to ink and color this piece since I haven't posted any art of Sherryl since 2013's No Sketchbook, No Problem [414]. Because I have difficulty letting color pics go up without a backdrop, I first put a blue sky and some clouds. Then I thought there needed a reason for her to be outside with the expression on her face she has, and came up with her being at a concert or music festival.

So how to make it look that way? Being that the view is looking up from below her shoulders (Sherryl is my tallest OC--as a human she'd be about 6' tall), I could get away with not showing multitides of other concertgoers around her, but what else could I do to make it look like a concert venue? Some hunting through Google Images gave me the result--those tall towers holding lights and speakers (which I later learned are called "delay towers"). More hunting ensued for good references images of these installations and finally settled on a configuration for towers holding a curved array of speakers, topped by horizontal trusses holding remote-controlled stage spotlights. So here is Sherryl, whooping and hollering along with the crowd. What might be playing at this venue? Well I fired up my "Music I can Draw To" playlist on YouTube (mostly EDM and its derivatives) and a sampling of some of the pieces that came up while I was working seemed to fit the mood:

--Don't Be Shy (Wave Racer remix) -- DCUP
--Wub a Dub Dub - SCRATON
--Hunny - ISLA
--Misguided - Bail3y
--Playboy (Fox Stevenson remix) -- Dodge & Fuski vs Nick Thayer
--Modest - Orygin
--Cut the Kid - Madeon (Gravity Falls tribute AMV)
--Stormchaser - Starlyte
--Eazy Dance - Mitchie M

Disclaimer: Taste in music is subjective. I like listening to this stuff. YMMV.

Technical:
...and set to coloring, with a promise to myself that I'd stick to cel-shading and not try to go overboard with the visuals. I kinda-sorta succeeded in that. If I had to do it again, I'd shade and highlight the aluminum-colored towers. The blue sky gradient was sampled from a stock image, but the clouds were entirely airbrushed by me at the beginning of the color session. This time I finished around 3am, after spending roughly 20 minutes slapping OBS Studio upside its head after I received an invitation to join a multi-livestream (I often watch streams while drawing to help motivate me). A not-insignificant amount of time was spent generating the stage lights, since I had to find a reference (these things are about $800 apiece) and rather than pasting copies of the photo into the scene, I created flat-shaded clipart by tracing and bucket-filling flat colors sampled from the photo, and then importing these into the finishd pic. I then finished the next day by futzing with the highlighting on Sherryl's eyes, and put a bolder outline around her silhouette to make her stand out better.

Original pencil on paper, digitally inked and colored with Krita 4.2.8. 22 layers, 222MB in-app, 15mb on-disk. Total editing time: 3:09 by way of Krita's internal project timer.