Posted to Tumblr on 2019-03-20
Original Description:
It’s been over a year since I’ve drawn my two sweatshirt sweethearts, Viviana and Copper! I missed them… ;3;
I had the idea for this one around Valentine’s Day, bbbbut I think I’m a bit late to call this a Valentine’s Day piece. :’)
This composition led to all kinds of strange challenges while drawing, such as me never having any idea what orientation my canvas was at when working zoomed in, and an interesting optical illusion of sorts where when I got it to look like they were making eye contact in the vertical orientation above, they suddenly looked like they were looking nowhere near each other when I rotated it by 90°. And of course ‘fixing’ it in that orientation broke it in the other.
I believe what actually happened is since in this vertical orientation they’re perceived as being above and below one another, then they needed to be looking mostly down to look like they were making eye contact. However, once you rotate it 90°, they’re perceived as being to the right and left of each other, so they’d need to be looking to their lefts to make eye contact. All of this is likely exacerbated by how they really shouldn’t be able to comfortably make eye contact in those positions at all.
I figured a solution would be to like calculate where ‘looking 45° down’ would be, and holy butts, it actually worked… Mostly. I still see the illusion sometimes. However, when I actually extended the sight lines of 45° down, they’re actually completely missing each other, but when I removed the guides it looks totally natural.
Brains are easily fooled and it’s best not to question it. :^)