A Very Special Day Has Arrived. April Fools? Never Heard Of It.

A very special day has arrived. April Fools? Never heard of it.

It's Cody's Birthday!

Can you believe this guy turns 34 this year?

Long rambles and extra pictures below the cut

Maybe I got a bit ambitious with the composition, especially since I was scrounging for time to get this done (we had quite a busy month) which meant I couldn't focus on details as much. But I knew I wanted to make something that felt significant for my boi.

I initially planned to include even more characters; the entirety of Gen 1 and a handful of others, but I knew that would've been too much for me to handle.

So I left on the cutting room floor-

The characters who Cody is on more negative terms with canonically (Duncan, Courtney, Alejandro)

Katie and Sadie (Sorry)

All but three of the post Gen 1 characters.

It's also the one year anniversary of posting my Total Drama art. Not that it's an especially significant thing to note, but it's pretty cool nonetheless.

Here are some alternate renders.

The background is mostly just a mix of background tiles & tones in MediBang, as well as overlays and decorative brushes.

Next are the characters laid out individually and transparently (Sans Justin, Trent, DJ and Lightning as they're egregiously incomplete below the shoulders (At least they have a full head, which is more than can be said of Zeke or Sierra))

Cody & Dawn and LeShawna & Beth were drawn on the same layer, so I can't really separate them.

Geoff, Izzy and Tyler are just very small.

Some characters get cool outfits, some get very light redesigns, a couple look pretty much how they do in the show.

Izzy is dressed as a piñata, because why wouldn't they be?

Harold's look is very loosely based on Beat from JSRF

LeShawna's design is based on a look she has in Dramarama.

I can't draw Gwen the same way twice.

Nobody else has any specific inspirations for their looks.

Now that I think of it, the centre of the drawing is not dissimilar to what I drew last year. Similar compositionally, but different contextually.

Kinda embarrassing to look at my older art now, but that just means I'm super happy with the stylistic evolution. You can tell I've gotten more comfortable with the way I draw TD characters.

Anyway, enough of my rambling.

Happy Birthday Cody!