Commission for of 's character Celine Ventus. This commission took soooo long but everything really worked out, I think.
For those curious on the background, it's a lot of Photoshop and SAI voodoo. I have a Clouder brush (which is in like every concept artist's custom brushes, mine is from Daarken's set) which is used to make the bulk of the forms, then cut out some shapes with the hard round brush. For the first pass, I put a palette knife filter over it, then went over again with the Clouder brush. After that, I did some color overlay layers to get the lighting how I wanted, and then on linear dodge layers made the snow (with an outer glow effect to help them stand out). I did all of this under the character layer, where Celine stood out way too much. But I had this problem before when I drew my Yui piece, so I knew how to fix it. I took colors from the background and glazed them over Celine, and kept in mind the lighting (that I had predetermined from the character drawing itself). I smoothed out a lot of the more rigid linework, but left a good chunk of it in tact, mostly to see if I could make something with lines flow well. I probably won't do the linework approach much in the future, but if I do, I definitely won't start with black lines! They definitely muddy everything up really hard, and it's even harder to recover from it.