Heavy Metal Charlie RE-MAKE

Hellraiser--Lemmy Kilmeister and Ozzy Osbourne
www.youtube.com/watch?v=zw79RV…

 
 Story time
  Once upon a time, when I was a patron, one of the perks was a link to a discord where I could dump art for a professional appraisal (by an artist I still watch whose name escapes me); who very gently blowtorched the original version of this drawing (link here: www.deviantart.com/thepsych0na… ). I studied his notes, shelfed my cringe-y misfire, and moved on. Two years later, the HBO pilot was announced, and, a few months down the line, Charlie Magne--the campy Disney princess of Hell--got a new name, Charlie Morningstar (appropriate given her father): along with a new look.

When I saw the makeover, I said, 'What the hell?' and did one of my own. This time I had Charlie cosplaying as Taarna from 'Heavy Metal'. 
www.youtube.com/watch?v=SYqEgF…

Notes:

1)Vivziepop's animation for her female characters borrows heavily from Bruce Tim, especially for the lips, so, I grabbed one of his drawings and studied the brush strokes. Thankfully I already had a paint brush installed in Photoshop that was nearly identical to Timm's called "kyle's thick-and-heavy".

2)Bruce Timm, as it turns out, DOES. NOT. DRAW. ABS on his ladies. EVER!

So, yeah: I had to look at his fan art for He-Man, Doc Savage, Namor, the Hulk, etc. to glean a conceivable approach to drawing toned women in his style; and then I drafted multiple layers to find the lines that would retain the VERY hard-earned muscularity I mapped out during the structure phase, while conveying the feminine athleticism so quintessential to Bruce Timm's aesthetic.

3)To get the pose and cosplay I wanted, I used a model of Taarna from a 3-D rig for sale; I just tweaked the angle until she was "large and in charge", and then screen-cap'd the shot I wanted. (for anyone curious: press window+print on a windows keyboard) Warning: No, screen cap doesn't work on Amazonprime (which is retarded, but, whatever, Amazon!).

4)For the background, I just used a simple angled gradient (a variation of the bucket tool in psd).

5)(I ssssuuuper did not want to draw all the details on that sword!); so, I decided to block out the sword's silhouette and emphasize the perspective by adding a soft-focus/deep focus.

I remembered Nadaxiel walking through the details for that technique in one of her videos; I found it, but the process wasn't specific enough. I needed to blur a specific chunk of the image for effect, not the background. I found Piximperfect's video, which was a bit of a grind to get through because of his slow-and-steady-lukewarm delivery. Ideal for teaching pre-K, grating if you're an adult with things to do and you just want the meat of the topic. His video was helpful, but still not specific for what I want; he talked about the iris blur feature in the blur filter window.

Iris blur lets you drop puddles or halos of focus, with the center for each halo remaining completely clear. Again, useful, but it wasn't what I needed.

Then I found Rossdraws. He duplicates the layer like Nadaxiel and Piximperfect, makes it a smart object, and then uses a gaussian filter; anything he doesn't want he just erases from the layer. Simple!

5)I would normally use the layer mask video by Nadaxiel to nest the sections of a drawing, to avoid tedious erasing later, but this drawing only uses flat colors, so, I didn't bother with a preliminary process I'd use for painting.

6)Oh, little tip:

If you want to make an image clear, and you want to use little to no lines, try only drawing lines where two parts of anything intersect.