bdnsfw:

Yeah, it’s important to recognize your deviancy before you can address them. Though I seem to just do a lot of recognizing and very little addressing.

So I wanted to color something again and ran across this Katia by luraiokun as a gift to Rick2Tails.

It caught my eye immediately. The white outline first, but notice the soles of the feet, the breast and the eye that aren’t colored in that light bluish grey really pop out. That’s the whole monochromatic thing again. But I just wanted a pretty cat butt to color, so afraid I didn’t go that route. Got rid of the square around it.

Another less obvious thing I did was remove all the saturation. There’s no color there, even if it appears to have blue in it. It doesn’t. It’s pure grey. That was done for a reason. Because when I apply my base colors on a Multiply layer, they will be darkened. But by first increasing the lightness, the resulting color will be just what it should be. I COULD have tried to remove the grey and make her white, but I’ve found that to be problematic. Better to leave it and brighten the base layer so the final color is what it should be.

You might notice I put the pale belly (nearly white) color on the underside of her tail also and very subtly in her… um… well… butt. No, it’s not canon, but I felt like it for some reason. Probably primarily to add a bit more interest. Also originally I had colored her entire soles of her feet in pink, but revised that when someone said they looked like rat feet. He was right. Pads are better. Next up, shading.

I started with this soft shading, but when I got to this point, I realized that – though I think it looks okay, it doesn’t fit with the style of the drawing and all those hard edges. So I started over and went with hard shading instead.

Yeah. I think that’s better. Not as “3D’ as soft, but it fits with the style better. There’s 2 levels of shading here. The obvious, but right where she’s sitting on her heels, under her armpit and on her neck just below her head there’s a dark shadow. Next, I got creative. I wanted to represent fur as right now she’s too smooth.

So what I did was used a small eraser with a short fade and “bit into” the shadow to give the impression of fur without having to actually draw any. Just tried to keep those “bites” flowing roughly in the direction the fur would at each point. This took, a while, but I think it looks better as a reminder that Katia is SUPPOSED to have fur, not just yellow skin. And doing it in the shadow seems to work pretty well.

And that’s it. A bit of gloss and highlighting, a butt-shadow and a (frankly very quick) background that’s suggestive of an outdoor scene if only by the colors. And now I can take a step back, look at her…

And feel bad because she’s disappointed that I again colored her nude. Sorry sadcat! You just look so GOOD that way. Hey, at least there’s no visible plumbing!