It took longer than expected, but I finished this piece. The style of Lucky Star makes it easier to do fanart, since their bodies are not very detailed. I went with the dotty style again, to hide the kinda junky lineart. I didn’t bother using the pen tool either. I reverted to my old ways. Miyuki is dressed as Arf (lol…), Kagami is dressed as Nanoha, Tsukasa is dressed as Hayate, and Konata is dressed as Fate. I took liberties with hair, since I know Hayage’s X thing is on the other side, and both Nanoha and Fate go twintail when they transform. However, I felt this would take away from the overall effect.

Blarrrrgh, can’t believe this is the only non-gift-art fanart piece of 2006. This is Touka from Utawarerumono. I whipped the whole thing out in one and a half days, but it was several hours at once, while listening to MTV2. I wanted to do some Utawarerumono fanart, and had this strange idea about what it would be like if all of Hakuoro’s posse went to go chill at the mall. Like for sure Benawi would be the one driving, and Mukuru and Aruru would head straight for the food court. I still like Karura best, but I figured Touka would be one of the easier characters to draw. I’d like to do some more, but we’ll see if I can maintain motivation.

Lineart was the usual deal, although Touka came out a little older looking than intended. I tried a different coloring method; while it is mostly monochromatic, I tried mixing some similar colors together. I really liked the effect it had, especially when I used burn and dodge for the shadows and highlights, respectively. The style is really fast for messier lineart, because it hides mistakes quite well, and blends quite easily. The downside is that it takes forever when covering a large swath of area, e.g. the skirt. I basically just tapped my tablet like a woodpecker while setting the brush to dry brush.

I messed up Touka’s big ole ears, but overall I’m pretty pleased with how it came out.

I was only planning on taking this to an early sketch stage, but it ended up fairly clean on its own. Although it’s not colored like most of the past fanart pieces, I figured it was good enough to display with the rest of them ^^. Anyway, the theme for this time was “dreams” which had me wavering between various ideas for a while. For some bizarre reason, I wanted to do a “Lacus Clyne ninja piece” (battle kimono!), but couldn’t see how that would fit in. Then I thought maybe I will do a “Naruto pimping in his Hokage outfit” piece, but didn’t sound like much fun (the Hokage uniform is like a dumpy frock with a big hat). But yesterday, after chatting with Ender about Azumanga Daioh, I had my idea! This is hyper-genki Tomo, who dreams of being an Interpol agent. With her pseudo-Fujiko Mine (from Lupin III) skills, who’s to say she couldn’t succeed someday? I tried to draw Tomo a bit older, and a bit more sophisticated, but I wanted to give her a slightly mischievous look, too. Then I scribbled her name out with my horrible handwriting, mwahahaha.

In spite of my best efforts, some of the dark on dark in her hair kinda blends in too much. While drawing the back parts, I discovered that Tomo’s hair can be drawn in the same way a simple Christmas tree can be drawn o__O.

I spent forever looking through the episodes for the scene where Tomo declares that she wants to be in Interpol, but I couldn’t find the scene for the life of me. It must be really short, and I didn’t know where to start. Eventually I ended up rooting through Azumanga Daioh galleries, before finally finding this picture. Speaking of which, the theme for next week is “roots”.

So I was totally stumped on this topic for the longest time, but finally I decided to air some frustration over the Lunamaria x Shinn pairing that’s currently going down in Gundam Seed Destiny. In spite of the fact that Shinn is a total sulky brat, he gets everything! So I started thinking, what kind of news could be broken to Shinn that would really rock his world. A couple options were batted around, but some were too mean:

• “I heard that those drugs they gave Stellar changed him into a woman…”
• “I think we should see other people.”
• “Someone just keyed the Impulse!”

I don’t totally hate Shinn, but he is pretty annoying sometimes. Plus the thought of him with a clown runway makes me snicker with glee. This was a pretty simple piece, but I wanted to try a little different coloring. I used really light shades for the base colors (or white), and used most of the more vibrant colors only for shading. I’m pleased with how it came out, overall. Lunamaria’s hair was trickier than I expected, and it was hard to get her to actually look like Lunamaria. The hair antennae helped, though.

Ender was worried about the fact that Kira also goes SEED a ton of times, but I told him that since Kira’s the Ultimate Coordinator, he probably doesn’t have to worry. Kira could probably grow more hair with a mere thought…

Next week’s theme is “Tranquility”.

I’m a week behind, but here’s my offering for the “Summer” theme. It’s Princess Fine of Fushigiboshi no Futago Hime, the glutton of the Sun Kingdom duo. Truly, is there anything so tragic as a dropped ice cream cone? This one was a quickie, since I am totally brain-blocked on the “Black and White” theme coming up, so I went SD with rather simplistic coloring. The next theme that I’ll probably be late on is “Heroes”.

For a little while, I kinda wanted to do an “Otou-san” hat version, for all you Azumanga Daioh fans out there. But then I remembered that I’m too lazy -__- …

I finally got tired of playing with the spell effects and whipped together a shoddy background (it’s just a screencap filtered over). I’m not sure if the spell effects actually enhanced the image, and I almost wonder if it would have been better without them. One of the problems I encountered with the effects was that they only show up well on dark backgrounds. I do like the little stars in orbit spell, and the particles on the wrapping effect were kinda neat. These effects were inspired by the tutorials on Natalie’s site, although I am not nearly as capable as she is.

The dress textures were actually pretty easy, and worked exactly as I thought they would. I stole small swatches of cloth texture from Guild Wars screencaps and patched them together in a layer. Underneath, I painted the dress red and gold the way I normally would, and then I placed the texture layers on top and messed with their blending properties (I used “Vivid Light” for the gold, and “Multiply” for the red) until they sorta melded. I think I mentioned it before, but this is my monk character on Guild Wars. This picture took way more time and layers that I had originally anticipated, but I did learn a lot, even if I’m not completely satisfied with the end result.