My dA submission for April, the lovely Kasumi from Dead or Alive, shown here in a peaceful, but sexy pic ^^. Made in PS7, with aid of graphics tablet, and you can find the original lineart here: [link]

Well, I gotta say, I'm pretty happy with this. As I said before, I wanted to expand my abilities with this pic, by taking on a few things I'm not normally so good at, such as the face (without tracing over a screenshot), hands, bikini and water. First of all, as you may well have realised (though my friend Kez didn't), this image is a combination of my own work and real photos of water and rock textures. I didn't take them myself, but I did obtain them from free texture websites ( [link] and [link]) which allow you to use them as you want, so there will be no removing this pic for copyright violations today, dA. I'm as clean as Kasumi is in this pic.

The hardest part was to get parts of her to appear as though they're slightly submerged into the water, while still resting her back on the large rock. Maybe she could have gone in a little deeper, but I didn't want to obscure too much of her body. It took quite alot of tweaking but I think the CG and photos do seem to blend with each other reasonably well. Better than previous attempts at such things anyway. Since I wanted to try doing water, I guess I was being a bit of a cheat just using a photo of it, but.. ehh. I doubt it would have turned out as convincingly, otherwise.

Colouring her didn't take too long, but even though I was happy with the way her face looked in the sketch, when colour was applied, she just looked really weird. I find that happens quite alot with faces. So I had to move her features around a little bit, and the eyes in particular needed the most work, but in the end I think she looks very Kasumi-like, which for my work, is crucial. The only other thing I changed was her left arm, which looked far too long originally. I actually worked through this rather quickly, probably because I resized the canvas to smaller dimensions before CG'ing, whereas I normally just keep it absolutely huge. It seems that none of the quality has been scarficed though, so I'll definately be doing that from now on. Makes for a much smaller .psd too.

What do I like? Well, even though I didn't create the ripples of the water myself, they do work very well for the pic, I feel. I like the skin and bikini colours, and she just generally looks really sweet. The shadows of the tree/bush leaves on the water helps to create the impression of a nice, secluded little area too. The hair is ok, but I reckon it could be better somehow, and I'm starting to think the lighting looks a bit uneven; Kasumi's body looks a tad brighter than the reflections of light on the water, and I tried correcting that, but never really got it.

Still, I think this was a success. Please give me your views! I'd be particularly interested in opinions on how well the photos work with the CG'ed Kasumi.