Zintiel swimsuit steps

Various steps that went into making

1. After a chat with *persekore sparked the idea, my sketchbook was in the other room, and I was lazy, so I quickly scrawled a thumbnail sketch on a nearby piece of cardboard. The thing is about a 1.5 inch square! I was going to redraw it later, but when I got around to it, the new drawing in my sketchbook left me underwhelmed, so I shrugged and just took a webcam pic of the thumbnail to start from!

2. In photoshop, I blew snapshot up very very large, and started refining the sketch. I added lots of empty space on all sides, to make sure I had enough room to make the sharks at least a slightly intimidating size. Much erasing, resizing, flipping horizontally, and of course Liquefying happened at this stage.

3. More of those things to make the final linework. I was still undecided about the actual simwsuit, but I knew that could wait. I put a quick blue gradient in the background and it ended up staying there the whole time right into the final image.

4. Flat colours! Still nothing on the swimsuit front.

5. Now this step is interesting. I put all the characters (lines, colours, eventually shadows, etc.) into a layer group, and gave it a transparency mask that I played around with, make the furthest parts of everything semi-transparent. That way they look like they're disappearing in the murky distance. Of course they're actually transparent, so I'd have had to do it some other way if I had had a real background (with objects and features!) instead of just the blue gradient.

6. Lots of shading! Some colour adjustment. Some blood drips. The shading is generally where a picture starts to come alive, as the shapes acquire a third dimension. I most often shade in two passes (i.e. multiply layers), where the second one darkens only the deepest shadows.

7. Highlights! Effects! A swimsuit? I'm cheating a bit cause I'm doing this after the fact, but the swimsuit was actually lavenderish for a long time while I was working. Many many other colours were tried.

8. Finishing touches! Shiny hair! Sunbeams! Silver trim on the swimsuit! But most importantly, cropping into a tighter, narrower shape, so you can't see where the sharks end and thus feel more trapped and surrounded. Of course, it is actually Zintiel who has the sharks right where she wants them.