Here's what I ended up with tonight. It's kind of a little ode to daydreaming in the shower. Below are the other sketches and process I went through to get here.

I started this by taking colors directly from the scene in Ladybird when she's in the car with the popular kids on the way to prom. She has this moment of silence for a few seconds, in which we just see this shot of her thinking with the blurry nighttime background. It's the moment where she matures in the film enough to voice her unpopular opinions. Anyways, I thought it was really beautiful. and moody shot.

I think that there's kind of a difference between how strong colors look in film, and how they look in an illustration. It might have something to do with the grainy texture and subtle variations in film, that don't translate when you sample a color and turn it into a shape. I think I'll try a few more with sampling from films whose colors I like, and see if there's a way to make it come out looking a bit brighter. I might also go back and do a night drawing using the same colors, because I think that might also be a factor.

So I went back into another color scheme on film that I liked (a shot from Peggy in mad men) and sampled the colors, but this time I altered the colors to mimic the feeling I got from the image more than just what eyedropping the colors did.

Then I did this sketch.

I was really liking how those wave and cloud shapes were looking so I rolled with that for a bit, and came up with this, which I'm really pleased with.