May Arnold! - Fanart

Mermay Alternative #18: May Arnold!

This drawing went through many stages before it reached the visual style of the final version. I think this would be a good art style for a children's book. The cat in the back is based on shocked pikachu...

I started with a digital pose doll to get the pose, but when I followed that too closely the character looked too bland, so I ultimately decided to mostly ignore the pose-doll and make a stick pose to get the flat 2D appeal I was shooting for.

Next step was to sketch in all of the animals. Arnold's boarding house tennants have a lot of strange pets, though maybe not to this extreme.

Next I wanted to make sure everything would look good in flat colours, so I did a sketch to test that.

Then the last step before the final pass was to redo everything in Adobe Illustrator with only linear gradients for shading. After this I added some effects in photoshop to finalize the piece.