Got another one! Here’s the original drawing by Kaz:
So I took that and converted to line art, using the new skillz Kaz taught me sorta…
And then removed the sketchwork and added flat colors. Well, I did do a gradient on the drums.
And finally the shading and highlighting. (I must say I do love the eye technique that I learned on a tutorial!) I could honestly have spent more time on shading in the chesticle area, but got tired of it so I’m calling this finished.
So now it’s time to introduce the drummer for the Not-Yet-Ready-For-Clothing Players band. Yes, it’s that surly bartender you all know and love. Somehow the girls have roped him into playing for them, though he seems none too happy about it. But then, he never seems too happy about anything.
Personally, I don’t think he would ever have joined the band until he realized what the view would be like from the back of the band. He does have a thing for Weedum-Ja after all. And the others provide great scenery too. Though, of course, he would NEVER admit it. He just says Weedum-Ja talked him into it.
Rather than just put it here and shut up, I enjoy yabbering too much. So I started with this. (Again, the blue is mine – I just don’t like white backgrounds) This is the sketch Kaz drew for me.
So the first step was to turn it into lineart that I could work the colors around. After Kaz’s suggestion of using a tapered stroke on paths for lines that end, I came up with this improvement:
Now I did screw up a bit and put some shading on the line layer, but owell. Notice the lines around the nose for instance that fade, or the breastbone line. Anyway, once I did that, it really did improve the overall look. However, I suspect that drawing such lines is easier in GraphicsGale than Photoshop. So then time to flat-color:
Again, this had a bit of highlighting that I improperly put on the line layer, but so goes it. The only color I had to improvise was the tongue here really. The head does look a bit large to me, but I was worried about shading since I really didn’t know how I’d be able to shade the snout/forehead. But I think I ended up doing okay anyway:
I watched a tutorial on eye shading and think I got a pretty interesting look for her eyes here, Spent an inordinate amount of time on her legs and belly, but that’s okay because I LIKE legs and bellies! And boob shading of course. Can never forget the boob shading. Considered shading for the mic stand, but then I decided that based on the light source, it probably wouldn’t shade here. Like my mic stand gradient? I sorta do!
And then, of course, throwing in the background. Definitely looks nice if I do say so myself! Off to post it all over the place and get all the loves. (ok, ok, it’s Kaz that drew it. But hey, I’m improving too!)
Ok, I finished all I plan to do on my Katia bass player. (till I get the all done and do one massive full-band image!) If anyone feels like uploading this to the fanart booru, be my guest. I’ll include a link to a high res image at the bottom here that would be best. E621 is fine too. HOLD OFF on that! Kaz has a suggestion to improve the line art and I’d love to see if that will make it better!
I just think I’ve exhausted my supply of inappropriate uploads on the Fanart booru to do it myself. I tried to keep it within Questionable bounds, but I don’t feel like taking the risk myself.
This is not a tutorial, it’s just a blog of what I did and I’m a beginner at these things for sure! But since Photoshop let’s you do layers, here’s all my layers and what they were intended for.
First, of course, Kaz’s original – scanned.
Next, I drew lines over it.
During one of Kaz’s streams, I saw how he was doing it, or at least I thought I did. Of course, he did it like lightning fast but I think I got the gist. I draw a path, curving the path as needed to at least come close to the primary lines.
The lines I drew were much fatter than this layer indicates – I thinned them down later. Once a path is in place, you use Stroke to draw a line over it at the color/size that the current paintbrush is set for. So here’s that stage (again, these lines are thinner than what I started with. I just thought the ending lines were too think so I thinned them down):
Then I put in the solid colors. I used the fill bucket for large areas, but then went over the edges with a small brush so there’s no edge weirdness. That took a long time to say the least. But I learned the necessity of that a while back when doing another color-job some time ago.
That’s where I left it yesterday. This morning I watched some tutorials and looked at the biggest repository of Katia fan art there is. (No silly, not the fanart booru… e621!) For research purposes only of course! Please be gentle – shading is a dark art to me and a lot of it is guesswork, but here’s what I finally came up with. (I tried to keep the shading modest till I get more confident with it)
And then the easy part – found a background ‘stage’ and stuck her in it:
BUT then Kaz suggested a tapering method of improving the line art. This is new and updated here. Mostly lines that end are now tapered rather than hard-ended. Mostly around eyes, mouth and boobies. Also a layer was causing background to be lighter than intended.
And that’s it for Katia. I plan to do the others too of course, and eventually put them all on stage with Katia.
Reblogging my own – is that a shitty thing to do? But doing so because Kaz suggested an improvement that I think warrants the reblog. New image here and high res is improved as well.
Ok, I finished all I plan to do on my Katia bass player. (till I get the all done and do one massive full-band image!) If anyone feels like uploading this to the fanart booru, be my guest. I’ll include a link to a high res image at the bottom here that would be best. E621 is fine too. HOLD OFF on that! Kaz has a suggestion to improve the line art and I’d love to see if that will make it better!
I just think I’ve exhausted my supply of inappropriate uploads on the Fanart booru to do it myself. I tried to keep it within Questionable bounds, but I don’t feel like taking the risk myself.
This is not a tutorial, it’s just a blog of what I did and I’m a beginner at these things for sure! But since Photoshop let’s you do layers, here’s all my layers and what they were intended for.
First, of course, Kaz’s original – scanned.
Next, I drew lines over it.
During one of Kaz’s streams, I saw how he was doing it, or at least I thought I did. Of course, he did it like lightning fast but I think I got the gist. I draw a path, curving the path as needed to at least come close to the primary lines.
The lines I drew were much fatter than this layer indicates – I thinned them down later. Once a path is in place, you use Stroke to draw a line over it at the color/size that the current paintbrush is set for. So here’s that stage (again, these lines are thinner than what I started with. I just thought the ending lines were too think so I thinned them down):
Then I put in the solid colors. I used the fill bucket for large areas, but then went over the edges with a small brush so there’s no edge weirdness. That took a long time to say the least. But I learned the necessity of that a while back when doing another color-job some time ago.
That’s where I left it yesterday. This morning I watched some tutorials and looked at the biggest repository of Katia fan art there is. (No silly, not the fanart booru… e621!) For research purposes only of course! Please be gentle – shading is a dark art to me and a lot of it is guesswork, but here’s what I finally came up with. (I tried to keep the shading modest till I get more confident with it)
And then the easy part – found a background ‘stage’ and stuck her in it:
BUT then Kaz suggested a tapering method of improving the line art. This is new and updated here. Mostly lines that end are now tapered rather than hard-ended. Mostly around eyes, mouth and boobies. Also a layer was causing background to be lighter than intended.
And that’s it for Katia. I plan to do the others too of course, and eventually put them all on stage with Katia.
I think I’ll kinda document my work on some of these Kazerad things he sent me. I’m INCREDIBLY slow at this stuff. Photoshop is just too complex for my simple thinking. I usually just do stuff like this in Paint.net but this needs more tools, so I’m learning as I go along. Here’s Day 1′s progress on Just One image!
The original from Kaz. (I added the blue background because white just hurts my eyes too much, and did some basic cleanup to make it easier to find the lines that are important)
And here’s my lineart and basic flat colors:
Still got a long way to go – and I’ll not emphasize those nips any more than they already are. Yeah, kinda NSFW but not extravagant.
Now, Nah had me concerned. See, I fully expected Kaz to have one nip obscured by a guitar strap and the other by the neck of the guitar or something. But no! As always, he defies expectations. No, he delivered will full nippage. But what am I to do about that? Censor KAZ?! What a horrible thought. But I do try to keep this at least semi-SFW. So I got creative. I removed the nips and put them in their own separate image:
Yes, these are Nah Nips! Why, if you feel the urge, you can just paste them right back on! (Well, you might need to do some image resizing first!)
But there’s a bonus! I think even Kaz thought it might be a bit risque so he added an extra page (for envelope transparency reasons). The caption will make all clear as mud:
Now, the number of questions this raises is almost infinite. Why is a werewolf attacking this innocent Lilmothiit? Why is the Lilmothiit walking around Tamriel without proper weaponry at the alert? Who owns the kitten? Why is he not defending his Lilmothiit master (or joining in the feast with his Werewolf master?) Why do I assume either of these are the kitten’s master? Why do I assume that kittens have to have masters?
Aggy’s getting down on the sax, but keepin’ it cool as always…
And we’ve got one mean, surly drummer:
He’s none too pleased with the costume, but we let him place that snare drum strategically.
Oh, and a couple of cheap crayon-works from Kaz:
This was a commissioned as “A picture of QW getting kicked out of the bar after Booze O’Clock. I believe the caption is “Fuck You Bald Joe, it’s BOOZE O’Clock”… but I think she slurred the end of the caption too.
And this was an idea by Furnut: Tail Wrestling. These are professional tail-wrestlers kids. Don’t try this at home.
Ok, well – he replied to an email I sent. The very man who contains the soul of Katia within his demented and sadistic head deigned to reply to my humble email!!! I’ll never wash my monitor again.
Yes – THAT Kaz. The designer of such memorable characters as:
Happy Gator, your Customer Service Friend!
Evil Quill Weave, the sexiest Argonian you’d ever like to be tied up by!
Mikahail, the funloving, devil-may-care Assassin…
Furry Red Fox Guy… wait… Not him… go back to that sexy argonian…
Yeah, her. And he did some yellow cat girl too I think…
(You can’t really call it hero worship though – he’s the madmad who causes Katia such tears. More like villian worship?) Anyway – no, mostly I just wanted to see if he’s ok with Katherine Managan. I pretty much knew what his answer would be, but still it seemed the polite thing to do if I’m going to promote it out there first. Of course he said it was fine as long as I wasn’t looking to profit (I’m not), though he did ask me to be sure to make it clear that it’s a fanfic (of a fanfic) and not endorsed or associated with Prequel. And that it wasn’t for-profit. (Profit? Off my innocent version of Katia? Perish the thought!) So I stuck a little disclaimer on my banner.
But he also made one little comment – basically, “for god’s sake, get Blender and learn to MESH”. Ok, not quite in those terms, but that’s the gist of it. He’s right of course. But my problem is time – I know I could Learn To Mesh, but by the time I finished Katia will have long since lost her Cloak to Sigrid and I’ll be lucky to clothe her in Ectoplasm.
So, to quote a certain fox, “I understand what you’re saying, and your comments are valuable, but I’m gonna ignore your advice.” (How’d that turn out for him btw?)
bdprequel 
