Pinnacle of Celebration

Drum roll please... the unveiling of the top project for this anniversary weekend...

This was originally one of my most popular projects, the second entry into my still in progress "Gathering of the Two-Six" great portrait. It was the first image I shared here on my blog back in June of 2013, and the first image I ever uploaded to DeviantArt and Minitokyo. Of course, I'm referring to Athena of the Two-Six, the super-powerful goddess of my Book of the Shadows series, standing as one of the twelve most powerful beings in existence. Her appearance and character are based around Boa Hancock of One Piece. 

Although I use her character sparingly in the overall Book of the Shadows series, she does come in a few different flavors. Her starring roles are in BotS: Overture, and the Looking Glass series, Cult of Athena. Athena is similar to Boa in many ways, although they are also quite different. Although the events of One Piece inform Athena's character, it is enhanced by a number of other characters and concepts as well, including the amalgam of the Greek tales associated with Athena and Medusa.

As noted in the linked post above, the original concept for this image, as part of the Gathering of the Two-Six project, was that Athena would be seated in the same setting alongside Anzushiro (Dark Magician Girl). 

At the time I originally drew this one, I chose the dress worn by Aoko Aozaki from the Mahou Tsukai no Yoru series, which hails of the same world in general as a number of other Type-Moon series (Fate/Stay Night, Tsukihime, to name a few). It wasn't because Aoko was meant to somehow be associated with Athena, but because as a formal dress it seemed to fit her well. 

Aoko isn't directly affiliated with Athena in any way. At first I mimicked the translucency of the lighter part of the dress, and was going to recreate the frills despite leaving them out of the drawing. But I decided not to stick the the translucent part or its frilled border. 

It was this image of Hancock that I used as the base. Due to the position of her relative to Anzu in the larger portrait, the relative image is actually flipped. The arm positions were changed, and I gave her a different facial expression. 

Originally I had Salome in the picture with her (you can see his head poking in). But as I began working on the member of the Two-Six immediately to the left (her right), I began to question Salome's exact placement. As a result I've decided to leave Salome out for now until that next piece is finalized, full image composition wise. I gave her more of a tanned complexion relative to her reference image. I merely thought it looked better than her normally very pale complexion. 

The most difficult part of this piece in terms of the experience of adding color to it was the outline, as was similarly the case when I did the Anzushiro of the Two-Six entry. Generally speaking, because I don't have/use any live trace programs, when I draw a picture and then scan it, I have to go over the lines of what I drew to get a clean, crisp, line art that is easier to work with. In the past I've used a few different methods, such as utilizing multiple layers, each being an enclosed outline of a unique color area of the image. For instance, if I was doing a character's hair, I'd create a new layer in PaintShop called "hair", use the paintbrush tool and set the size of the brush to something small (anywhere from 2 to 10), set the color to black, and trace the line art for the hair. Then, I'd go back and fill in the white space encapsulated by the black lines, smooth out any rough borders, and you've got a finished element. 

Sometimes I do just the entire outline of the entire image, and color it by duplicating the original base layer and filling in the relevant areas so as to better achieve uniform crisp lines without worrying too much about the coloring process. 

Here, however, every bit of outline is actually a darker shading of the part of the image it encapsulates, all done on the same layer. So rather than her legs being outlined in black, for instance, they're just a darker shade of brown from her actual legs. The outline on the dress is just a darker shade of blue than the dress itself. This led to a complication with the hair. 

Basically, I committed to the whole outline concept after I'd already finished doing her hair, which was the first element I worked on since it intersects so much of the image. Her hair is black, so I just used pure black. But, there's nothing darker than black (anime pun not intended). I debated whether or not that was a problem. Honestly, it didn't make much difference if there was an outline visible with her hair or not. Being black without the complex and intricate lighting effects to illuminate strands or even bundles of hair, outlining it would make negligible difference. Even so, I chose to do it anyway. So, if you look very, very, very carefully, at the right angle, zoomed in enough, you will see that her hair is outlined in "pure black" (RGB 0,0,0,) while her hair itself is ultra dark grey (RGB 16,16,16). I have another version of this image - I don't know, I might share it eventually - where I swap out her black locks for the shimmering silvery ones Anzushiro herself has in her Gathering part of the portrait. 

As I've noted in the past, I'm not terribly great at shading. I usually end up going overboard, not properly taking into account the angle of the light that I;m supposed to be representing. So I tried very hard to keep myself restrained, and limit the amount of shadow I added. 

At the end of the day, I can say that I'm fairly proud of the work I've done on this piece. I do love it a great deal, and hope you do too. Truly a fitting capstone to the 3rd anniversary of this blog. Hope you enjoyed.