💕🤭 Best Phriends...? 🤭💕

Breaking another fanart drought with another green bird: Phyllis Phanatic! ✨⚾🔔🟢

She's a rare character who occasionally appears during The Phanatic's skits. She's usually, if not always, romantically paired with him during these events, but in his official bio, Phyllis is just stated as his best friend. 🤔 That's...interesting. 😂

I've seen her referred to as "Phiona" in multiple online spaces, but I'm not sure where this originated. I've been digging around for info and just about every reliable source I've seen, has called her Phyllis; even one suggesting this was her name as far back to the early 90's...where she's also outwardly labeled as a girlfriend. 😂

And there's "Mrs. Phanatic", a name that was said by one of the play-by-play announcers, a couple of times or so, when another unrelated blonde Phanatic was involved in a skit. She too was given the love interest role at times...and...black hair? I...can't tell if this is supposed to be an entirely different character, or someone got Phyllis' name wrong. 🤷🏾‍♀️ The Phanatic was never married, so, it's definitely not his wife...Maybe there were brief moments where they thought about changing her up...or...her character hasn't been solidified. She seems to only exist whenever they need her to. 😂😭 I guess the concept of her changes to suit whatever amusing thing is going on.

Something else I'm not sure about is if I remember seeing her during my earlier mascot-interest days. I remember Phoebe, The Phanatic's mom, who appears more often in comparison. She's completely established and has a recognizable outfit. With how rare and inconsistent Phyllis seems to be, I can't tell if I saw her or The Phanatic somewhat resembling her in one of his skits, 'cause that happens too. 😂

Either way, I recognize her now! Heh, she's the other part of the reason I got back into mascots again. It was sparked after they parodied that uh...CEO incident last year. 🫣 I think because of how viral that skit went, they brought her back for a fake engagement based on The Bachelor. 😆

I've been working on this piece since late October. It took so long because I needed to settle on a design post for Phyllis first and wanted to release both posts at once. I also got sick...there was a computer virus scare...holidays...working on KTCW stuff...and there was even a large moment where I started to get discouraged by how the drawing was turning out. I'm still learning how to draw both of them and had to learn to be more patient with myself as I figure it out. I'm glad I overcame that feeling, 'cause I'm pretty satisfied with how it turned out. 😄 I came back to it in December and again in February. I would have loved to have this done for Valentine's Day but...oh well. 🤷🏾‍♀️

Phyllis doesn't have her own separate costume; if she ever did, she doesn't now. She's quite literally any extra Phanatic in a wig, so, there were some things I wanted to try out to make her more distinct from him. For the sake of my headcanons, I went with females being more yellow while males are more of a richer green to make it more reflective of how birds tend to be in real life. I also decided on females having thinner eyelashes, smaller tails, and beaks / snouts. And the eyebrows acting more like an extension of their hair at times. I'm sure there are more things I'm going to play around with when it comes to their species, like the positioning of the eyes...and where the knee joints are supposed to be. 🤔

I wanted my take on Phyllis to be shorter than Phanatic but didn't mean to make her look that short. I planned on her retaining most of her height. I really can't tell if she was intended to be taller than him or the height of the performer playing her, just so happened to be that way. I guess Phanatic is standing on something, lol. (Please don't count that fuzz on the side of her hand as a finger. Her hand is NOT on backwards. 😭)

I knew I wanted the background for this piece to resemble the Kisscam setting from that parody skit in some way with its heart-filled boarder. I got a lil' carried away. xD I tried to add question marks to express how ambiguous their relationship status is, but it felt too cluttered. I decided to add that questioning in title instead. :3

I seriously do wonder what their deal is, officially. Like, I wonder if the ones in charge of the skits keep this aspect so loose because they don't want to overcomplicate things. Having The Phanatic in a dedicated relationship is very likely to wipe out a good chunk of his antics. 😂 He's been the way he is for almost fifty years. Introducing this kinda change might be hard to pull off without making people upset...😬🤷🏾‍♀️

I've been thinking about creating an AU, that's pretty much built around their relationship, to explain what's going on with them, why it's so odd, what their family backgrounds look like and even the lives of other mascots. But I dunno...there's so many things I'm trying to do. ┐(´ー｀)┌

If I draw these characters long enough, the ideas I had will seep through in some way.

Here are some alternate versions: