Post Interview Page 5

Realization dawns, and like every new day it brings with it mixed blessings. Knowledge contains within it both yin and yang, benefit and drawback, boon and hurdle, chocolate chip cookies, and oatmeal raisin cookies. You get the idea. Would it have been better for Gina to complete her journey home unaware of her predicament? To reach her apartment, change out of her nonexistent clothes and go to bed in blissful ignorance of the spectacle she created? Or is it better this way? Where although she's embarrassed, she might still take some kind of action to preserve at least some of her modesty? 

These are questions that are best left to the philosophers. No one can truly know what the results of the path not taken might have brought, but one thing is clear: Gina now finds herself the undisputed centre of attention of a bus full of respectful, but keenly observant men. Her next actions will forge a new future, one of her own making, as do we all. 

An artist's note: because the rendering style of this story is so involved, I'd avoided having too many background characters up until this point because they would have to be soft shaded too, and that would take a lot of time. I knew, though, that I wanted the bus to be full so that Gina would have to stand since that would be more embarrassing when she finally came out of the gnomes' spell. I also didn't want to resort to just a big purple silhouette blob with eyeballs here and there, since that also wouldn't work particularly well with soft shading. Luckily Gina's pose came together pretty quickly, so I was able to get the onlookers at least somewhere close to the same level of shading as she has. Although I obviously had to cut some corners. Hopefully the final result is effective.