Kagura, everyone’s favourite taciturn miko / archer / closet lesbian from Prism Ark. I took my time on this, and I really, really like how it turned out. Technically it’s a request fill for several people, though my terrible secret is that I intended to do it anyway. Prism Ark really has great character art. Shame about the show itself. I’m at the point that I’m basically watching each week to hunt through the eyecatches for tracing material. After a lot of deliberation I decided to add the Momiji leaves that are present in the original eyecatch. Spent maybe ten minutes on them, just a quick stroke outline and a random gradient mesh to add some random colour, but they ended up looking really good.
The other good thing is that I have finally gone out and replaced my old chair, which was utterly fuckered. This means that in completing this trace, I haven’t fucked up my arm like I did with the last one. I ended up taking a day off work due to being unable to move my fingers properly last time (stupiditydedication). In turn, this will mean I can probably do more than one trace a month. Assuming I have time, some real-world issues are fucking with me at the moment - the part of my company that I work for is being essentially purchased by an Indian software firm and while they’ve indicated they want to retain us all, I’m not sure if I’ll still have a job.
No idea what I’ll be doing next, so if anyone has any requests then feel free to put them forward. Though I’ll probably ignore you and do my own thing. Possibly dig up my Negima project again, though I guess that’s kind of run out of steam.
MEGAS HAWT
Man, I gotta ask, after seeing all your vectors I still can’t figure out how you get that soft look to them all. Are you using a blur on them at some point?
Duplicate the trace into a new layer, gaussian blur (radius 4.0) the top layer, set opacity to 30%.
Oooh, very cool! xD
Kagura eyecatch?
Well, it’s from the game, though, so I don’t know about that…
The problem with the game CGs is that they’re very highly detailed, but extremely low res. For the above I used a 1024×576 source, any smaller and I’d have had nowhere near the detail. Compared to a lot of my Negima traces for example, the higher-detail looks a heck of a lot better. But also takes more work.
I once did a trace of a 400×300 image before. When I enlarged it I see pixels like fishballs. Suffice to say it turned out pretty bad. So bad, in fact, I deleted it after completion.