Added 1 new A* page:After the ink & watercolor drawing I worked up from the previous A* page, I thought maybe I'd leave out the ink and try to take the actual physical, original artwork into a "no lines" style like what I've been doing with the digital coloring; watercolor painting is generally done with not much for lines, after all. Not that I know much about watercolor painting really! But that didn't stop me from giving it a shot, and then it occurred to me that I could take that watercolor, scan it in, and use it as a fill for the digital fill. Why? I dunno... Because! : D So it sort of went like this:
Ie I scanned the pencils, pulled them back out and painted purple watercolor over them (pulled back with white ink here and there), erased the pencil, scanned the watercolors, created a digital fill based on the pencil lines using Photoshop's Lasso Tool, then layered the scanned pencil and watercolor layers into that lasso-cropped fill. And it kinda worked out I think; the watercolor gives the fill a volumetric, organic quality it wouldn't have had otherwise, and the pencil lines make the polygonal fill lines a little more natural-looking in spots, and give the watercolors some weight and definition, particularly for facial detail. In retrospect I suppose I could have scanned the pencils and watercolors together (I mean, waited until I did the watercolors over the pencils, and then not erased the pencils), but it isn't like I had this planned out exactly or anything. : p But it did seem to fit together surprisingly well; heck, I didn't even have to adjust the color or value of the scanned lines or watercolor, they worked fine straight out of the scanner and just set to "Multiply" over everything.
Oh and the final step was cropping out some of the distracting pencil lines around Selenis' neck, and the guy's hand. Outputting the final version was slightly tricky; normally I'd have done it as a jpeg, but dark blue in particular comes out really blurry in jpegs; ended up going with a 256-color PNG.
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