So, this is the project that's been occupying most of my at-home art activity since late March 2011. Inspired by Administrator at Work, a 2003 picture, a print of which I had in my "Book O' Art" I had on display at my Artist's Alley table during FWA '11.  static418, then at his first furry con, was inspired to commission this one, which reached completion just before Anthrocon, and delivery just after.

So, what does 8 years of experience between "Administrator at Work" and this garner? An increased knowledge of lighting effects, layers and blending modes, as well as tactics including rim-lighting, soft-shadowing, gradients and "glowing" effects, exemplified by all the glowing LED's sprinkled throughout the backdrop. I feel this is my most complicated picture to date--artists far better than I felt sorry for the state my coloring hand was going to be in after completing this one, based on the pencils at the time. The end result is every bit as complex, but with several elements repositioned and/or straightened/de-skewed.

Funny thing about this pic is it was built entirely around a throwaway sketch intended to nail down the characters' "circuit" markings. If you check out static418's page, you'll see an earlier version of the character I drew (the one with the black T-shirt reading "TEH") that was supposed to be the basis of the completed pic. But the face of this version was so much better that I decided to build the rest of the pic around that sketch. Because of recurring overtime assignments, I could not work on this during weekdays, and additional weekend assignments kept me from making much progress until the final weeks before Anthrocon when I finally started seeing full weekends off. In fact, the first half of 2011 was a real drought for me artwise because of all that OT. Most of my output during that time was confined to conventions since FWA. But hopeully the dry spell is over and I can get some real progress on...the other two commissions that were in progress when this one happened :D

Pencil on bristol, digital polyline inking and color done in Micrografx Picture Publisher 10. 7 layers, 227 megabytes at full uncompressed size.