Commentary
Winning Version:
George had underestimated the slimming effects of the magic tea. Assuming their clothes would be suited well enough to both before and after, George had gotten the "leave clothes unchanged" style of magic tea.
Now in only a very loose shirt, George was deciding whether to put on the black shirt that designated them an employee of the shop over the loose shirt that had remained on, or to replace the loose shirt with the black one.
Second Place Version:
As advertised, George's clothes weren't loose after drinking the magic tea.
Not as advertised, except maybe in the fine print, however, George's clothes did not keep the same fit as before, and were now smaller, and much more form fitting.
Which mostly worked for George, but the now very tiny black shirt did little to indicate that George was an employee of the comic shop.
Granted, as it was just a black shirt, it never did a great job of that anyway, but George still considered borrowing a larger black shirt from Justin.
Behind The Scenes
Which type of magic tea got was determined by a poll, and the outcome of clothes not changing, leaving George in just a big shirt, won.
The results were a bit close, however (65 votes to 60 votes), and I wanted to see how easy it would be to make both using my current coloring methods.
The actual answer was it didn't work because of transparent shadow layer overlap.
So I modified my methods so there wouldn't be transparent shadow layer overlap by not using transparent shadows.
So THERE.
This method basically involves doing the old method, but rasterizing copies as images, giving me a color I can use without transparency.
Which is a bit slower in the short term, but actually makes reusable palettes easier in the long run, and should make gradients look more natural if I ever feel so inclined.
As for doing multiple versions of close polls, it's something I'll consider in the future IF it's like this, and not that big a deal to do. There are some polls where a different option would result in a completely different image, and if I were to do that, it would be as a "Dan's choice", not technically part of one milestone image.
GRANTED, significantly different second places that were really close as a "Dan's choice" image IS an option.
