Idea inspiration
It really has been a wild 6 months for anyone trying to plan for the future. If you believe what you read online, we are headed for a white collar apocalypse and the safest jobs are now the bluest collar ones, previously known as the back-breaking manual labour that you were supposed to go to university to avoid.
An interesting thread on Twitter (by one of the developers of Fallout New Vegas):
so anyway what are kids supposed to learn & what are they supposed to do when they’re adults
we’ve established that math beyond arithmetic is out. art, music, composition are unnecessary because there’s no money in it and people can’t wait to embrace machine-generated Content.
— Josh Sawyer (@jesawyer) May 24, 2023
Art inspiration
None in particular this time. I did try posing some Clip Studio 3D models, but …
Challenges
… boy oh boy are hands difficult to draw, even using shortcuts like 3D models. I am at least gaining an appreciation for how difficult they are, and how much they contribute to a character’s pose. I think the reader’s eye probably goes first to a characters eyes, and then to their hands.
This was a pretty complex idea to tackle in a gag comic. I like the result but had to cheat a little by giving AI chan more personality than she would usually have.
I don’t think it needs to be said that people losing their jobs is not funny. But if it weren’t all happening so quickly, we should at least allow ourselves some pause to remember blue collar workers like the populations of mining towns, fighting an unwinnable war against climate change. The typical consolation for those workers was that they should just go and learn how to code. That was pretty ridiculous in and of itself, but I think it is topped by the mental picture of stereotypical white collar workers rolling up their sleeves and all becoming plumbers.
Rewards
There is yet another dramatic close-up in this one. It was yet again a lot of fun to draw. I think they may be here to stay.
