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Misty Spainhower — Description

It's my stepmom's birthday! Showing my gratitude the only way my heart truly knows how: with art. Misty's been an incredibly important part of my life for over a decade now. We haven't always gotten along or seen eye to eye, but that was my fault. She already wasn't quite ready for kids when she married my dad, and I was an angsty teenager, which is probably the only thing in this universe worse than being French. She put up with my bullshit the whole way through that awkward phase, though. Mad respect there, because I was absolutely insufferable. I mean, I still am, but at least I'm not that sort of insufferable. Misty served as the strong female role model I desperately needed at home, something I'd otherwise only get in passing glimpses from my teachers at school. She's been a better mother to me than my birth mom, because my biological mother will read this statement and take it not as a challenge to actually better herself and earn back my trust, but as fuel in her furnace of hate and spite. Misty doesn't deserve to put up with that drama, but she stays with us, and she's stood up for me and my brother with all the fury of a valkyrie. In my book, there's no higher honor than that sort of family bond. Perhaps we suffer, but we suffer together, and when the pits of Hell open before us, we jump as one. Happy birthday, Misty, thanks for putting up with it all. You're a Spainhower for sure ^^;
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Since I gave my dad a shout out when I drew him, it's only fair I do the same for Misty. She's got a small independent apparel business which we'd all really appreciate boosted numbers on. So hey, maybe do me a teensy favor and consider checking out her services some time? ;)
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https://www.mistymakesitdesigns.com/
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Design notes, my stepmom's from Georgia, so I knew off the bat I was going to try and give this piece a Southern shtick. The real question was how exactly that was going to manifest. Usually when I have a wide net like this, my methodology is to pull up two tabs for completely different categories of reference images, blast ideas onto my "mannequin" as it were, and slowly start tinkering until they finally click together somewhere in the middle. In this case, I started with three aesthetics I thought would be appropriate: southern belle, country singer, and 90s kid. Honestly, all this really taught me was that country singer apparently is the midpoint between 90s kid and southern belle XD Fair enough I suppose. I started to get into a flow when I realized I could take the shapes you'd typically see in Victorian-era outfits and sort of transpose the outline onto something more sleek and modern, like turning the hoop skirt frills into pant leg bottoms. I think the blouse might’ve been just a little too much, which is not a sentence I'd have thought a frilly blouse lover like me would ever say, but I mean that more in how it interacts with the rest of the composition. Idk, it's still really pretty in my opinion, and in Misty's, which is all that really matters in the end.