(AAA folder)

See [this journal] for an overview of the AAA series.

Another in a bunch of pics I drew around the turn of the century, the loose theme being to place my OC's in everyday settings doing ordinary things. Oftentimes it was to depict them wearing outfits I saw as visually interesting, so they usually turn out to be snapshots of some of the fashion at the time. In this one, Cynthia is depicted waiting at a bus stop wondering where the next bus is. Since this is the dawn of the 21st century, there's no smartphones, and no bus-tracking utilities. The outfit depicted is a composite of various "looks" although I believe the impetus was to depict someone wearing a specific style of simplified loafer with a low-wedge sole and a toggle fastener in place of laces. I don't have any other details on the identity of this style, but I'd guess that most of the examples I saw were knockoffs of a higher-tier model. The rest of Cynthia's ensemble included straight-leg jeans, a denim jacket and a Polo Sport backpack.

A minor easter egg only relevant to folks living in the suburbs immediately north of New York City exists in this pic, the bus network based in Westchester County, of which a few routes cross the border into the city limits. Carrying the nickname "Bee-Line Bus", their logo is of a cartoon bee drawn by MAD artist jack Davis (according to the linked Wiki article, he lived next to a Bee-Line route and enjoyed seeing his artwork pass by several times a day). On the bus schedule post I parodied this with a "Messchester County" logo and a "Snail Line" mascot.

For some reason, when devising the title, I kept getting recollections of Madonna's song "Who's That Girl" :D

Technical:
--Not a whole lot of technical stuff to talk about here. This was representative of much of the artwork I did in the era. Definitely long before I started performing digital touch-ups on my hand-drawn artwork, and some years before I learned to actually draw cheekbones on my character models :D . Like the previous Ancient Archive entry, this image was scanned from a photocopy, something I did frequently at the time on pics that I thought I might do a marker-color job, so if I screw it up I still have clean copies to recover with. And yes, one more example of placing the completion date on a pic without ever anticipating that it would become useful two decades later.

Pencil on copy paper inked with Rapidiograph pens. Composited using Micrografx Picture Publisher 10. Project ID# 529