Multiple Solutions
The Idea
While I was in the process of suddenly having an epiphany about my second piece in my Sustained Investigation, I came up with two ideas: the one I used then, and this idea. While we were doing partner critiques for our second pieces, the girl I was paired with looked at my thumbnails and told me that I should still use this idea at some point.
So, when it came time to start my last piece and I was reaching around for ideas, my sketchbook opened to the page with that thumbnail on it, and I remembered how much I loved the idea and decided to do it.
And then I looked at the clock and the day and thought, "Oh shoot. The test is this week." I literally had 24 hours to create a piece out of nothing.
I grabbed a piece of paper, cut it down just a bit, then started sketching.
A small bit of this piece! It's kind of a weird size.
Here's the thumbnail of the piece from back when I was coming up with an idea for my second piece in the Sustained Investigation!
The Process
Twenty-four hours. Piece of cake, right?
In truth, I had maybe two days, but I couldn't pull an all-nighter and I definitely was not going to skip classes. Not to mention I had rehearsals for a ballroom concert and online classes. So when it came down to it, I probably really only had twelve hours.
Well, shoot.
With no time to lose, I started sketching as fast as I possibly could. Drawing myself was easy, since I'd done it so many times. But deciding who was going to be surrounding me was tough. With all my pieces, I use my original characters for most of the background characters, sometimes even throwing in cameos from the Elppaenip Detective Agency. (I'm not kidding. You can go back and look at my other pieces to see if you can find the squad in any of them.)
Surprisingly, I was able to finish the sketch fairly quickly. I nabbed some characters from a story I've written (Betting on Mushrooms) and one character from my Potentially Kinetic stories. It fit, it worked, it was time to move onward and at a much faster pace.
I started solidifying the thoughts above each person, penning my thought bubble the same way I did in the second piece to kind of tie them together. I struggled big time with the caption at the top. I just could not get it to look centered!
It was finally basically done, and at 2am the morning the day before the test, gosh dang it! I ended up putting the caption in pen to make it obvious.
REALLY old sketch I found of two of these characters.