Encounter In Aisle 6

Another picture based off one of my stories over at Fiction Branches. Jon, a teenage boy-turned-slug-girl, is attacked by a crazy lady in the grocery store. Luckily, the attacker doesn't understand that the difference in scale means her attempt will result only in a stinging pain and some parched skin, rather than total full-body dehydration through absorption.

The start of this storyline is here, and the relevant chapter is here, if you want to read it.

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This took way longer to finish than it really should've, mostly because I was trying to fit a bunch of other things into my schedule in the past few weeks. Thankfully, things cleared up a bit and I was able to get it wrapped up, and I'm pretty happy with how it turned out. I do wish I'd taken the time to do the background by hand, but between the lighting complexities and my general trouble with perspective, I probably never would've gotten it finished if I had. Oh well.

I tried a new shading approach on the hair and the skin; it's a bit more labor-intensive, but I think I like the results better. Also played around with the eyes a bit; not sure if this is what I'll be sticking with, but a little variety's always good.

Oddly enough, I actually did this picture a couple months before I wrote the story, and then wrote Jon's transformation half-coincidentally to have about the same end result. So, uh, I guess that might retroactively be Jon in that image?

P.S. with regards to the question of how effects like dehydration by absorption scale with size, I recommend the excellent essay "The Biology of B-Movie Monsters," a fascinating explanation of the square-cube law and its effects on animal biology, and a direct inspiration for that chapter of the story