💞💌💟 Exes & He-roes 💟💌💞

🏹☁✨💘 Happy Heartsmas! 💘✨☁🎯

...Is what I would have said if I had posted this in time for Valentine's Day Weekend. (._.; )

I've been thinking of drawing LP and Della falling in the sky together like the posters, or "Last Adventure", and thought it would make for a good Valentine card design. 😊 The more I've been thinking about how we got the Plan B ending for the series, the more I wonder what Plan A would have been like and I have a strong feeling we were supposed to see something like that...🤔 

I've been theorizing that the "skydiving" trend derives from Dad getting separated from his vehicle during the cosmic storm. I think most, if not all, of this trend leads back to Launchpad, too...he was the first to almost fall out the plane, Louie falls out in a similar manner, Kit, who's way too similar to LP in the reboot, gets detached from his plane, Launchpad flies out of the limo's window in "Moonlander", and it's Launchpad's fault that everyone got taken out of the plane in "Last Adventure". 

I took these thoughts, combined them with the heart background and "hands touching" elements from my earlier Delpad art and changed it into having them sorta float in zero gravity instead.

Heh, whenever I'm drawing them together, I'm always concerned about how their height difference and proportions should be handled. I can't draw as well freehanded on a tablet; I need traditional lines to guide me. I knew that with the pose I had planned, I'd have to create the key pieces separately. The first try came out so terrible...I put that thing in the paper shredder, lmayo.😭 Not wanting to mess up like that again, I went lighter with a construction base, put the scanned drawings closer together in Clip Studio, printed copies of that and sorted out the details.

I'm not used to drawing their heads at the angles I needed for this. 😅 It's throwing me off; it makes me think I should have made the top part of Launchpad's beak higher like he usually has it...this guy's chin makes it harder to have his head tilt downward without making adjustments to his neck or rest of his body too. 😂

When I was trying to decide on a sky background, I started thinking about "Last Crash". The episode as a whole was extremely fitting to what I was trying to convey with my piece, so, I searched through and chose this screenshot for reference:

I started leaning further into borrowing elements from this episode as I played around with developing a boarder for the heart-shape and ended up with something that sorta resembled the window of a plane.

As I was finding a way to format "You're My Hero!", I suddenly read the quote in the tune of "There Goes My Hero" from "Ragnarok". 😆 I was so tempted to adjust the phrase to resemble it more, but I told myself to just leave it alone. x) (Gosh, that felt like such an important song...I want to talk about it...in the future.) And, ha, I was trying really hard not to use the SF Fedora font for it since I've used it multiple times already...but it just works so well! It's THE DuckTales font! Nothing else in the font library was as compelling to use as this one! 😆

When it came to filling up empty spaces inside of the heart window, "Hero!" felt like it needed to be underlined. I thought about using an arrow, to allude to The Spear and to tie-in with Cupid. I had also recently discussed elsewhere that if LP was the reason why Della went to space, he is essentially the bow to her arrow. 😊 It was making a TON of sense to do something with that! So, I started off with a plane, stretched it out to modify into an arrow...and then just ultimately decided to go ahead 'n' turn it into a simplified version of The Spear. 😆

I'm pretty pleased with the finished result, (maybe the right arm could have came out a little better,) but AHUGH! I can't believe I missed this deadline! 😣 I had all of my February thumbnail sketches and notes for it done in advance...and yet I still had to cut corners in an attempt to make it for the one after it...😑 I'm not off to a great start with improving this year...Dx

This time, it was largely out of my control, so, I gotta force myself to get over it. There's nothing I could've done about that. The second biggest thing that held this piece back, was trying to get the hand holding right. I wanted it to make sense, and it was difficult to find the exact "big hand and smaller hand interlocking fingers" reference I needed. I didn't want it to look like he was crushing her hand...I'm still a little unsure if I did it well. (._.; ) I was really close to changing the hand positions entirely, but it was too important for what I wanted to do with the following piece.

As great as it feels to be on time, or at least as close to that as possible, this was not worth rushing. I need to learn how to go and take the L when it's thirty minutes to midnight and I haven't even finalized a description full of notes... ┐(´ー｀)┌

Here's a more Space-y themed version:

This phrase came about because I was hoping Della would say some variation of LP's "greatest ___ of all" quote towards the end of their realization. That family was the treasure she was after in the storm. Yeah, we did get the "family" quote said in full in the finale, but didn't have much to do with LP...

I was going to see if I could incorporate a black hole into the background, since it's likely that some kind of wormhole led Dad to another dimension. But I think I was trying to save time, or the clouds were already filling up a lot of the area where I wanted to place it. Either way, I think it's fine as is. The heart-shaped window pretty much gives off the same notion.

I wasn't going to say anything about this, but since it's a lot more apparent here, I might as well talk about it: I theorized Dad was attacked by some kind of monster in the storm and that maybe it was still lurking around somewhere...seeking revenge on Dad, or maybe both of the pilots, like The Gilded Man was with Della. I started adding creatures to my more elaborate pieces to reflect that idea and this time around, I wanted something based on "Trickening"s Hazel House decoration. I originally had it look like white lace for the heart, but that wasn't working out. It drew more attention that I wanted. I made the monster green and placed it inside of the heart to see if I could do something a little more subtle with it. And it worked a lot better this way! A lot of it gets covered up with the words and the environment. I'm gonna see how long I can keep this up...🤔

Here's some more variants:

I wanted to see what the piece would look like if the pilots were front and center.

And a few more:

 I was thinking about having some drawings where Della is an orange-leaning red and LP is a green-ish teal. These colors complement each other and with all the blue-fading-into-purple going on in the darker background, the colors basically make HDL's color combination. I was already doing a similar thing with their clothes, and the outer background in the original, and I've done that sorta thing in an older piece too.

But I also did it because of the amount of red present while Della was in the cosmic storm.

This is a prominent color of Scrooge and his company.

If red represented Scrooge, teal is complementary to this color, and if Dad worked for an evil company, as LP's speculation about Gandra suggested in "Last Adventure"...I think he could have worked for Glomgold Industries. 👀 Or at least had access to a machine owned by the company. 

• Donald, Louie, Owlson and Gibbus worked for him...Daisy was going to work for him before ultimately working for Emma Glamour (who...does wear shades of teal...and is the mother of one of the show's villains...huh.). In spite of being connected to evil people, none of these characters themselves are evil. It's very possible that the same could be said for Dad. 

• Glomgold is Scrooge's main rival. He was the other party involved in the Atlantis trip; which was openly compared to the Spear incident. The area was also described as having "strange weather patterns in a mysterious location near treasure". There was a similar thing going on in "Raiders" where their company planes were even parked in opposite directions... 

• There was a green vehicle depicted in LP's family wall photo, when he looked unrecognizable, that later turns into Scrooge's red one when his design goes back to normal. A lot of the other predominately green vehicles in the show, have been associated with Glomgold's company, like the abandoned subway train, The Glomwheel, and The Glomcoaster. 

• (I'm now realizing that there are a couple of arrows included in the vandalism of the train's interior. One of which is a "💘"...And accents of purple show up with the last two machines...🤔)

• Gladstone's blimp was first anchored very close to the company's building. 

• When Glomgold showed up in "New Gods", he was on a rocket kiddie ride! The rocket itself wasn't green, but the base of the ride was! I've been theorizing about his involvement with Dad for a while and couldn't believe my eyes when I first saw this! The fact that the words "Space Race" is also written on the base, when there certainly could have been some kinda "race against time" or emergency element to the cosmic storm, makes this scene even CRAZIER!

• It was suggested through Glomgold's experience in "Shadow War" that LP fell into water after a scary encounter, got amnesia from it, and went through a drastic change. This may also be telling us that LP has a different persona under a false name, somewhere within his history. 

• Suavepad kinda gave us some of this too.

• Glomgold seems to have shared personality traits and parallels with Launchpad in the same way that Scrooge and Della have with each other.

I'll definitely talk more about that stuff some other time, but yeah! I got some amusing results out of these variants. The heart window really helps to sell the idea of Della heading outside of her world to reach wherever Dad was, and in the darker version, how he doesn't belong there. I love that. 🥰

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*•. ̧♥ Originally Posted ♥ ̧.•*'
  ˜”*°• February 19th, 2025 •°*”~

Tools Used: Clip Studio Paint EX.

ladies and gentlemen we are floating in space

we're also GETTING MORE DIRECT WITH THIS ONE! [fire emojis]

someone on tumblr, twitter or whatever is probably / will probably be mad about that

TOO BAD! it's my blog! it's my art!

i saw things i couldn't ignore and wanted to figure out what they meant

FULL STEAM AHEAD!