More Beach Day In Cromwell

Summer is almost over, and winter is coming!
This is no Game Of Thrones piece. I would have liked to do one, and my story has its own silver-haired dragon queen, but I don’t have a specific project in mind, so that potential project is lacking in a great many details. 

But, it is true that winter is coming. So, before it gets here, why not a little last enjoyment of summer? There might be just enough time for one more trip to the beach. And that is precisely where we are going.

The original thesis behind this image was that Drusilla Arenzai of the Cromwell Universe of my fan fiction stories, was spending a day at the beach to celebrate "Christmas". Due to the differences in location, time dilation, and other factors that one can throw into a sci-fi plot point of convenience, while it is Christmas in the Japan of the Earth Yugi was born on, it's summer and July on Neo Nemesis where he now lives with Drusilla when not traversing the cosmos.

The story, however, is a very lighthearted moment, really, in which the reader gets to see how Drusilla, who is normally a very astute, sanguine, observer of her own laws, will sometimes bend those rules to achieve seemingly trite goals - and the extent she will go to justify it in a nigh-refutable manner.

The sand was an interesting experiment that led to another interesting experiment. I originally began coloring this Drusilla image right after the original drawing was posted. I was using PaintShop then, essentially was placing each color on its own layer. I wanted to try at making a more granular effect on the sand, but wasn’t sure how to go about it. Tackling it from a very literal perspective, the look of anything that makes it seem not smooth, is the alteration between light and shadow; which face is exposed to light, which is merely out of light’s coverage. Speckling the sand area with dark colors makes sense. But that was proving time consuming, and not particularly good to look at. Then, while toying with another image, I stumbled on the function in PaintShop to add noise, not only remove it. 

The other experiment has to do with the line art. There is a several-year gap between when I started coloring this image, and now. I switched computers a few times, went through a couple versions of PaintShop, and ultimately completed this project on a combination of Adobe’s Sketchbook Pro and Photoshop. When I got back to it, I was planning a quick burst to get it done, but I ran into the issue of format. Because I was using Sketchbook mainly now, I was having trouble getting the file in a format I could use. When it wasn’t being flattened into a messy single layer, it lost the transparency of the layers, specifically the line art layer. To get around that, I basically created a black background layer, and “cut” the colors into that layer. It’s certainly not a process I would customarily recommend, but for the stage where my project was, going back to retrace line art, let alone going back to the line art to start from the beginning, would have been more time consuming. 

I might go back and redo the way her left eye shows through her hair. I played around with the various options, including not showing that part of the eye at all, but I was never comfortable with how any of them looked. I liked this one best, but I still think I might go back to just leaving the outline of the eye. 

Then we come to the next one, C.C. In Cromwell Universe, C.C appears as a character very suddenly, just there, talking with Drusilla, without having been introduced in any real way. It’s only later that I go back and explain her presence. Drusilla has many acquaintances, many people she can turn to and seek counsel. However, it can’t really be said she is awash in friends; a consequence of being an intergalactic empress on the constant move. C.C is probably the closest friend she has right now. So, if Drusilla is going to be having an outing to celebrate a holiday, C.C is probably the first name on the short list after her family. 


This is the swimsuit design used in my latest work
This C.C image isn’t terribly complicated. Similar to Drusilla, and most of my female characters in general, her hair is very long. For practicality sake, she’d probably want it tied up some way. I don’t know much about women’s hair care or styling, but this seemed like something that made sense while not being so intricate and fashionable as to say it was something that she spent a lot of time on; just grabbed a clip and pinned up a bunch of hair. 

I wanted her facial expression to be reciprocal to Drusilla’s, so that you can almost imagine that she was responding to some dry humor between them (likely having to do with Yugi). The choice of the swimsuit is from an official promotional image, turned figure, for Code Geass. I actually have that particular figure. I changed the color to help drive home the whole Christmas theme, so went with red and white instead of white and black. It works particularly well with C.C since her hair is already green, so you complete the trio of Christmas colors. 








Well, that ends that. Hope you enjoyed your summer. The holiday season countdown is on its way, with Halloween just over a month away. I hope to have something ready for then too. Until next time...

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