Happy Birthday, Dabi!

This was so much fun!
I love the pieces, where I brainstorm and add a lot of detail and "easter eggs".

As you can see, in the concept everything was much brighter and I used different colors overall. His hoodie changed to black because I realized, it would be way more fitting for contrasting the bright, colorful and happy decoration. I usually avoid all black clothing, because most of my art is pretty dark anyways and I have trouble shading them so that details still pop. But in this case, it was just too fitting!

First I wanted to do a flash, that would highlight how intrusive this entire scene is, but I made a nice candle lighting by pure accident and just went with a cozy ambient in the end. Speaking of - the lighting is not entirely correct... but I really struggled with the darkness and figured "Ok maybe a door is open and light is shining in from another room"

The cake was another hurdle... I didn't want to do it too perfect - much like the Christmas cookies in the Twice and Toga Christmas piece:

Because I guess they're still normal people and villains... no pastry chefs!

The Endeavor Plushie was the idea of a friend. Because Dabi has still black hair here, the LOV wouldn't know about his connection to Endeavor. Maybe they bought it because Endeavor = Fire = Dabi? Or maybe all All Might merch was sold out?
Anyways, I love how subtly disrespecting this little detail is - adding to the whole annoyed mood of Dabi haha!

I actually utilize the Border Effect option quite often now! I sketched out the party streamers and the little ridges on his paper plate. For me, it's super convenient, because I can see the overall shape right at the beginning and perspective wise makes much more sense to me/is easy to correct than when sketching out from scratch.